BIOS Screen gets stuck for 5 min

[MindlessJoy]

literally for 5+ minutes. I've done some googling and found several guys with my same problem and they haven't really fixed it...

Basically when I start my computer, everything runs, but it won't get past the first bios screen. It says memory and just idles for 5minutes with the above options:



press del to enter setup/q-flash F9 for xpress recovery F12 for something I forgot



If I choose either of the options, it takes 5 minutes for it to respond, I tried choosing Del and it lead me to bios load from floppy, xpress recovery to log into windows and use my PC, and if I click nothing it leads me to CMOS utility menu.



My motherboard is Intel G45 Gigabyte




Things I've tried so far:

clearing my cmos
took out the battery for a few minutes and putted it back in (which my friend told me wasn't a smart thing to do but anyway...)



so in summary my computer works except that it takes 5minutes to boot up when it normally takes 30 seconds :x

[zybch]

Swap your RAM with some known good stuff.
An increasing number of problems of all sorts nowadays are the result of dodgy RAM, and with RAM being produced in such huge quantities a smaller and smaller number of samples are being tested.
Also, have you tired flashing the PC with a later BIOS? Perhaps you even did ti with the wrong BIOS. I did that with a board from MSI I bought several years ago. Went to their website, downloaded the appropriate BIOS, flashed my board and the thing was screwed. When I contacted them about it they said that a screw up had been made and the wrong file was listed (which I downloaded and used to update my BIOS). Thankfully they shipped me out a replacement board and a box to send back the 'bricked' one to them in.

[MindlessJoy]

well umm actually this is a PC I've used for 14 months, and this problem occurred when I tried to force restart my computer last night when the computer was overloaded with multiple programs turned on at the same time. If possible I'd like to keep my current hardware :x hope you understand that, but ofcourse if it's necessary I will replace what I need

[zybch]

Ah, ok. Makes more (well less really) sense then.
Could still be the RAM, could even be the crappy heatsink paste used on lots of CPUs nowadays has gone from a nice gooey mess to flaky brittleness and your board is trying to protect you from it having a meltdown.
Have you tried just unplugging everything (video card, HDD, CD, sound, USB devices etc) except 1 stick of RAM and seeing if that makes any difference.

[MindlessJoy]

oh yes, I even unplugged all my jumpers at the bottom of the board, everything including both rams which I don't think I shoulda done, but oh well.

And it might really be some overheating problem, lately I've been experience massive lags during a certain MMO game I play... though I don't have any idea how to confirm that, last time I cleaned my fans was around 4 months ago, but I kinda doubt a clean would have any impact on this problem since it's something other people have also experienced. (if you google F9 xpress recovery you'll find around 3 people with my problem, I'm not sure if posting links to other forums would be a good idea :x )

I'm going to bed in a bit so I'll leave this thread hanging, it's almost 7 AM (+8 GMT, hong kong time) been up half the night to get my computer booted back up