(25 november 2016 I tried to post this, but somehow it failed, maybe too many newsgroups or non-existing ones, today 1 december 2016 I try again).
(Meanwhile the strange "power on for 10 seconds then shutdown cycles has reoccured". It now takes 2 or 3 attempts to start my PC ?!
(The first attempt will auto-turn it off after power on. The second attempt the power stays on but the bios seems to freeze. The third one caused by pressing reset makes it boot again, what the hell ?)
Hello,
First a little story what lead to the scary observation:
I wanted to test some Delphi source code/computer code, it had to be recompiled. Somehow Delphi complains the executable cannot be written too.
Annoyed as I was I thought it might be because some services were not running so I tried to logoff. This lead to accidently clicking sleep instead.
The computer went into sleep mode, this further annoyed me, which led to scary situation:
Knowing that my PC from 2006 is pretty robust and can handle some heat and dust and stuff I took a risk and waited until the fans were not completely shutdown but the lights were and I pressed the power button.
I am a believer that turning on PCs too soon can jinx it.
And guess what ?! LOW AND BEHOLD... the JINX happened... it scaried the shit out of me.
What happened is the following:
The system would not come back on... only briefly... after pressing the power button the system would spin up a few seconds... and then shutdown.
I tried everything... cutting the power... deplugging the cables.
Replugged everything and turned on PC and same thing happened PC came on and would immediately shut down.
Me very scared at this point that motherboard was blown up somehow. It almost felt like another motherboard death... but it was still reacting.
Which led me to believe there must have been something corrupting the BIOS.
I removed the battery... replugged it... still same shit happened... system would shut down... I couldn't believe it... me very scared/worried at this point.
I decided to blow across the cpu with my mouth/air and apperently blew off a dust particle.
Tried to turn on the PC one last time... would probably have kept trying anyway... and low and behold it came back to live ?!
Now starting Delphi XE7 lead to some strange access violation of read adress
000000 in some module... not sure how that is related... but this scared the shit out of me too a little bit... but not too worried.Haven't figured out yet why it can't overwrite an executable though.
I am now not sure what will happen if I turn off my PC... will it suddenly die ?! I don't know.
But I have a theory/hypothesis though what might be causing motherboard deaths of old PCs/BIOSES:
Some kind of hardware race condition in the shutdown/start up code.
Apperently one must wait until the PC has had multiple seconds to shutdown... maybe as much as 10 to 30 seconds.
If the WAIT is not done... and the POWER button is pressed before the shutdown is complete the BIOS could possibly enter a UNRECOVERABLE STATE.
Apperently there is some kind of bug in the BIOS that will cause a quick SLEEP/START UP/SLEEP/START UP sequence to make it FAIL.
Consider this a WARNING too all.
Another explanation could be that some dust or hair was causing a short circuit... that is also a possibility since I was trying to clean of some hair earlier.
This could also explain the memory failure... perhaps the hair touched a memory chip.. I have seen this happen one time before... later I will do a little winzip/winrar CRC checking to see if any of that is true.
For now I will assume the BIOS is NOT SAFE for fast power down/power up cycles !
To hardware manufacturers/BIOS programmers I say/write the following:
TEST YOUR CHIPS/BIOSES BETTER concerning fast power down/power up sequences where one might interrupt the other !
Bye, Skybuck.