Need Technical Support for Computer Issue

So here's the deal, past few days my computer would randomly not start up. The fans would start turning, the lights would come on, and then after about half a second or so it would all turn off. A second or so later it would do this again and stop, and it would cycle until I turned off the power. I turn off the power to the plug and just sit for a while, and when I try later it comes on just fine, and stays on for a while. Then I try and turn it on the next day and same issue, same thing resolves it.

So so far I have cleaned out my computer and made sure that everything was plugged in tight to make sure nothing came undone. I also looked around to see if there was anything that might be causing a short.

So far the only thing to work is sitting around doing nothing, and just hoping it works the next time I try to boot it up, which sadly works somehow.

Talking with a friend who has good computer knowledge (or mostly his dad who works on them relaying info to me) told me either new power supply, or reset my mother board manually. So before going out to dish out money I have in limited supply I reset my CMOS on the motherboard myself.

So few hours later power it up, and it comes up just fine.....except my BIOS is gone and I can't access windows, and now I'm completely at a loss on how to get things set up so I can access windows again. I'm not the most technology saavy at this level of computers (my friend did all this for me and might not be available to fix things for me in the next few days) so I need some help on figuring out how to fix things after all this.

What is the last thing to be written on your screen at bootup, verbatim?

Couldn't tell you. Turned it off in frustration for a bit, and now the same power issue creeps up. Looks like I'll need a new power supply before I even try and fix up my BIOS.

But in essence, I put my motherboard drivers CD in my DVD drive, and the computer won't read it, I can't get to windows, and last time I tried, I got a mini split second blue screen. It seems life just wants to curse me at the moment.

Sounds like you might need to alter your bootup order in your CMOS; it may be trying to boot off of a secondary hard drive or PXE or something; you'll want your optical drive as the first priority and /dev/sda1 (however your BIOS refers to that) as second priority.

I had this exact same problem. I changed my powersupply (which was what was causing it apparently) and got a new case fan (my main fan wasnt working) and havent had the problem since.

Ok, here's an update (as I need more help again). I got a new powersupply, that fixed the powering up issue (or so I thought) we then reinstalled windows and I grabbed what files I wanted off my window.old folder, and scanned intensely a few times for viruses (as we determined a virus to be the issue, since my BIOs restore points all got wiped).

Things worked fine for a few days, and now suddenly I'm having the same issue with it starting up, lights turn on, fans go, and after 0.5 sec they all power off, then start up again a second later, and off, and cycle like this.

To try and fix things up, I went in and made sure every cord was firmly in place so that nothing got loose. That checked out fine. I looked around to see if anything could be causing a short (at least in so far as I'm able to identify) and found nothing. I've tried 3 different power strips, and 2 different outlets as well as 2 different power cords, and nothing changed.

So I'm back to square one all over again.

just in case anybody's waiting for me to sound off on this, I've got nothing.

Maybe your mobo died? Or is in the process of dying? I had that problem after I got a new mobo. Basically, after a a month or so my computer would either begin to start-up then turn off, though eventually it would start. After a while, it would just not turn on. Tried a bunch of things, figuring it was my case's power connects or my PSU but both proved to be working, in the end it was my mobo. I RMA'd it, got a new one and no problem since. I know the issue isn't the same, but perhaps it is the mobo? I'm no expert though. :/