My son and I have assembled an abit ka7 / athlon
system in an in-win q500 full-tower case with a 300W
power supply.

About half the time it fails to reboot (POST fails, more or
less immediately) on a cold power-up.  I believe it is
significantly more likely to reboot on a power-up if the
power has recently been on.

I'm suspecting a power supply problem: perhaps filter
capacitors --- either in the power supply, or on the
motherboard --- need a little extra to charge fully, so
the second time around the machine reboots.

When we first assembled the system, we tried to make
it minimal --- motherboard (with processor and memory),
video card, and keyboard (i.e., enough for the POST, and
some diagnostics), but nothing else.  We believe we saw
the same symptoms then.  We then added a floppy drive
(to boot into dos), then a scsi card, hard drive, and external
cd-rom, an then a nic, and a sometimes sound card.

The symptoms appear to be fairly repeatable, independent
of the configuration.  We don't think it's bad 'peripheral'
hardware.  Also, once booted up, the system seems to
run without problems.  (We haven't exercised it extensively.)

Would anyone have suggestion about what might be
going on?  Any ideas for diagnostics?  Any ideas for
a fix?

Thanks for your help.

     Frank R.Brown
     Frank.R.Brown@MailAndNews

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