W8 restarts do not behave as expected in all cases.

I have a strange problem when doing restarts of my W8 Pro X64 system either by manually doing a restart or a restart as a result of installing software or an MS update. Here's what is happening.

1. When a restart is initiated I get the normal progress circle stating 'Restarting'.

2. After a few seconds my screen goes blank. I assume, and correct me if I am wrong, that I am now out of the OS, about to enter BIOS pocessing.

3. My monitor's (I have two) LED's will then glow orange for about 15-20 seconds. Orange indicates standby mode. After this the LED becomes white, the normal color, and I start to see messages from the UEFI/BIOS. The text however is larger then normal and is cut off at the right edge. I also see a blinking cursor line at the top left of the screen right before I start to see the messages.

4. Computer then gets into W8 with no problems.

What I just outlined above happens to about 75% of my restarts. The other 25% do not make my monitor go into standby mode for more than 2 seconds. After these 2 seconds the LED becomes white and I see the BIOS messages which are now normal size and there is no blinking cursor. Cold start ups behave like the 25% of my restarts.

I believe this behavior began when I replaced a defective Corsair H100 CPU cooling unit. I thought that perhaps the H100 during it's initializing might be delaying things. Corsair support told me this wasn't so.

Is this a problem with W8, my monitor, video card, video cable connection? I tried various things but to no avail. I even installed a clean copy of W8 without any extra software and had the same results.

since you were inside the pc replacing something i'd start by going back in.

equip antistatic wrist strap or earth yourself in some other way before touching components.
check the cooler is seated properly.
check all the cables are firmly fitted.
check all the expansion cards/graphics cards and ram are all seated properly, remove items and clean out slots using compressed air.

remove all items from the computer, except what you need to boot up, cpu/ram/gpu/hdd..keyboard and mouse nothing else.
check if the problem occurs with a very basic setup
if not then add devices one by one repeating the test after each device is added.
if fault occurs or happens remove last device and repeat the test to see if it's a fluke or not, remove other devices insert possible faulty device and see if it happens in a barebones environment.

could be anything could be nothing, could be the bios or a feedback issue from the cooler, try the old cooler and see if the problem happens as well.

get back in touch

best of luck

Here's what hasn't helped. Flashed new BIOS's when they became available. I reseated my RAM. Moved video card to another slot. Can't use old cooler as I had to return it. Tried HDMI and DVI cables instead of DisplayPort. Unplugged USB and Esata devices.

The only things left to do is remove my 2 HDD in a RAID 0 config. They are on a Marvell controller. My boot device is a Samsung SSD 830. Remove one HDD. Use my IGPU instead of my HD7970.

Another weird thing that is happening is that sometimes W8 will hang at the start screen when my USB printer is connected. If I unplug it at this time the circle progress bar will appear and W8 will start up. This is an intermittent thing.