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When I power on my PC, the fans will start as normal for around 3 seconds, before shutting down. This happens twice, before it will start booting up normally.

I got a Asus Rampage Extreme II motherboard, and this started happening after I updated to the latest BIOS driver (version 2101).

Something similar also happens after attempting to wake the machine from sleep. The fans will start up and shut down twice. The exception here is thought, that it will never go into the OS (win7). The fans will just keep spinning (at rather high frequency), but nothing happens. The only way to get out of this, is to completely shut down and restart the machine.

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I have the same problem with my Asus motherboard but it only happens after I've run Ubuntu. On another forum someone said that Asus BIOS' tend to do that when the CPU is overclocked. Try to reset your BIOS settings. – ZippyV Jul 24 '12 at 19:23
I've tried resetting the BIOS settings without luck. Before updating the BIOS, I had the CPU overclocked to 3.9 GHz, and didn't have any issues. – nifty Jul 24 '12 at 20:15
It is not uncommon for motherboards to "double POST" from a COLD restart (where you physically cut power--most modern computers never lose 100% power unless you unplug them or turn off the plug strip etc). As to why, the reasons vary and it can be the result of a bug in a firmware revision etc. – horatio Jul 25 '12 at 16:17

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This means the motherboard cannot start up with its current BIOS settings. After it fails, it retries the next time with default settings, which works. The problem is usually a timing or voltage setting.

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It still won't work after trying to reset all BIOS settings to the defaults. – nifty Jul 24 '12 at 20:21
@nifty: You mean it still powers up twice? Or does it have some different problem? – David Schwartz Jul 24 '12 at 20:28
Same issue. Two short spin ups, then it boots correctly. – nifty Jul 24 '12 at 20:42
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Looks like this was a problem with a faulty RAM. I took out one of them, and now everything works as expected.

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Faulty RAM, or slow RAM? Perhaps the default memory settings weren't compatible with that stick, and only after automatically rebooting, and backing them down, did it work. – Jonathon Reinhart Jul 25 '12 at 15:50
I tried putting the RAM into a different slot, and now everything seems to work perfectly. So I guess its a faulty RAM slot instead then? – nifty Jul 25 '12 at 17:43

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