I have a custom built PC made with part that are second hand, made by myself. I think I have a motherboard error, but I am not sure. My PC used to boot, but now it doesn't. I have it built on only necessary hardware. Occasionally it will POST, but sometimes it won't. When it doesn't the power light will come on and the fans will spin and so will the hard drive, but I get no video. When it does POST and I boot off of a Damn Small Linux boot disk, it will begin startup procedures, then it will freeze and won't continue. It doesn't get past initiation. I think it may be a motherboard error, but I'm not sure. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Reset the bios and if the mainboard is over 3 years old, or if you are unsure, buy a new mainboard battery. The battery can cause weird issues on some boards.

To make sure it's not a memory issue, if you have 2 sticks in, take one out a reboot with only one in. If that doesn't work, take it back out and put the other one in. If it's still not working, we can assume that it's probably not the memory.

The problem could be CPU related as well. Take the heatsink and fan off, and remove the processor. Get yourself some new clean thermal grease and clean the heatsink off and processor and then apply new thermal grease. Replace processor and fan, and see if that works. If the CPU is getting hot, it could be locking up. A good indicator that it might be heat related is if after the computer cools for a while, it's able to get past POST, but after a few reboots it's not.

There is no easy way to test the mainboard except to elimate the other parts as being the problem, unless your mainboard does POST beeps. If you have a system speaker plugged into the mainboard, it should beep at you if it can't boot past POST. The beep sequence tells you what is wrong with your system. You will have to look in the manual for the beep codes. If you do not have a system speaker, let me know and I'll give you one.

Try the above and let me know how it goes.

I would also like to look up your board to see if it's known to have issue. What kind of board do you have, how much memory, how many sticks, and what kind of CPU do you have? All this info may help me figure out whats up if you do not solve it yourself.

I will try some of the tips you gave me tomorrow, but for now here are the specs. I have a Asus P4C800-E motherboard with 4 sticks of ram at at total of about 1.25 gb of ram. I do have an internal speaker hooked directly to the motherboard, but for some reason it normally won't give me POST beeps. And after taking the thermal grease off I found my processor is an Intel Pentium 4 3.000 ghz. I will test the RAM tomorrow and I soon hope to buy a new battery.
P.S. in order to get the manual for the Asus P4C800-E you have to get the Japanese (at least I think it's Japanese) manual and translate it.

You should be able to get an english manual for it online at the ASUS website. I am aware that the P4 series boards did have a temperature problem with the CPU after a couple years of use. I had the P4P800 deluxe and it ran good for a few years, until it had similiar problems. The problem was that the weight of the heatsink and fan on the CPU pushed down on the board and the heat from the CPU damaged the temperature sensor. The fix was to loosen up the brackets some on the heatsink so it wasn't putting so much pressure on the CPU. I have since upgraded as I wanted a dual core CPU.

Here are a couple links to some forums that may help as well. I believe this is where I found the info for my problems.

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/7272/

www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-suppor...00-problem-list.html