Hi people, here's a wierd one: Spec for new machine I just built: Mobo: Gigabyte GA-K8N51PVM9-RH CPU: AMD 64 4600 X2 GFX: Gigabyte Geforce 7600GT PCIE Heatpipe Sound: Creative Labs X-FI extrememusic HDD: 2X Seagates on RAID 0 (onboard) TV: Nebula DigiTv Card RAM: Corsair Value DDR400 1GB (matched pair) PSU: Xpro 460w Quiet PSU with a big fan An intake fan and an exhaust fan The problem is that when I power it down overnight it won't boot in the morning! Windows locks up early on in the boot process - with the activity bar freezing a second or so into the first black screen with the windows logo. I can fix this by going into safe mode and removing the NVIDIA display driver. Then I can boot normally, re-install the display driver, reboot and have fun - all devices installed and happy. I can reboot again and again with no problem. I can power down and start up an hour later with no problems. Then its night time and I power off. In the morning when I power up, the problem has returned! So maybe it's.... 1. The PSU - Perhaps it doesn't like the initial 'Spike' when I hit the power. Don't think so because I can power up fine as long as I powered down less than an hour or so beforehand. 2. CMOS battery failing? But I'd expect to find all the CMOS settings reset to default when I power up. This is not the case. 3. Hardware resources getting wrongly scanned by the bios? Then surely the error would happen on every cold boot. 4. Um. 'Chip creep?', or something that only works when it's warm? 5. RAM? I ran a bootable memory test tool on the RAM for a couple of hours. No problems. 6. Device conflicts? Seems likely. I had trouble with the X-Fi and the GFX living together, but solved that by ensuring that the X-Fi drivers are installed first. Basically, I'm racking my brains to work out what changes occur in a machine that has been powered down for 8 hours, that don't happen in one that's been off for 1 hour. Would anybody like to mull it over with me? Cheers, Nick

Hi, I would go alone with #4. Could be a chip on the Hard drive board or the Motherboard IDE or Sata circuits. I have had similar problems but never got as far along as you are getting. It's usually a HD that has problems spining up. If I have any brain storms I'll get back to you. Good Luck, Jim

Output Specification - Red +5V ...30A - Yellow +12V...30A - White -5V ...0.5A - Blue -12V ...0.8A - Purple +3.3V ..28A - Brown +5 VSB..3 A - Orange P.G. - Black GND - Grey PS-ON ATX 12V (+5V & 3.3V TOTAL OUTPUT 230W) According to the data from above, I have a feeling your PSU is the culprit here. Even though it rated at 460W, it's more like a 300W clone. If you have the opportunity to swap and test your system with a loaner or spare PSU, I'd suggest you do that, before going out to purchase a better one. The Secret Letter From Iraq

Thanks for your responses and cheers sabertooth for taking the time to look that stuff up. Sadly its not the PSU. I replaced mine with a big dudey expesive one from work without any joy. Anyway, I might be a bit closer to a solution now. I enabled boot logging - once for a failed boot and once for a good one. Comparing the two shows that first of all, nothing very much gets loaded on the failed boot (no surprise), but perhaps more importantly, the failed boot logs ntoskrnl.exe as being the first thing loaded, while the good boot loads ntoskrnlpa.exe Not sure what the difference between these is, or even why the system changes its mind which one it feels like loading but I guess my next focus will be to see if theres a way I can force it to always use ntoskrnlpa.exe

Woops. ntoskrnlpa.exe should read ntkrnlpa.exe. Nick

Q811493 Security Patch I am not so sure the above has something to do with your PC issues, but felt I should post it. Note: The original patch was over 5MB, the new revised Q811493 patch is a smaller 3.2Mb. The Secret Letter From Iraq

I forced the kernel to ntkrnlpa.exe by adding /KERNEL=ntkrnlpa.exe to boot.ini. This didn't help. The boot log shows that this does force the loading of the above kernel but doesn't make the problem go away. So maybe the loading of ntoskrnl.exe was an effect of the error rather than the cause. Still blundering in the dark, I'm now going to assume it's a device conflict between graphics and sound, so I'm going to play with the boot.ini /PCILOCK switch for a bit.