A different boot problem

[BrianG]

I have just built a new system and I'm having problems with booting from cold.

When I press the power switch, the system appears to start, fans run and it sounds like it tries to access the hard drive.
The system then "hangs", with the disk access light flashing four times at short intervals and a blank monitor display.

It never reaches the POST screen.

If I press and hold the power button, the power shuts down. I then press the power button again and the system will boot up normally and run happily for the rest of the day.
My immediate suspicion was the power supply, a Corsair VX450. I've borrowed an Enermax 1050 watt PSU and this behaves exactly the same, so I can rule that out.

The hardware is as follows:
Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4 motherboard with AMD Phenom II x4 945 processor. Updated to latest (F3) BIOS.
4GB Corsair DDR3 RAM.
ATI Radeon HD4550 PCIe Graphics card.
WD Caviar Blue 250GB SATA drive + WD Caviar Green 1TB SATA drive.
Corsair VX450 Power Supply.
Silverstone PS02 Tower Case.
With the exception of the WD 1TB drive, everything is new.

On the Gigabyte website it says the F3 BIOS corrects a power up problem, so I'm wondering if this is an ongoing problem with this motherboard.
Emailing Gigabyte tech support has not received any reply.

(I should also mention that I'm not overclocking, everything is at it's default setting.)

[joe3fl]

Try clearing CMOS and check the settings for you BIOS. Also, updating the BIOS is not a good idea unless you already have a problem. See if you can revert to the original BIOS.

[BrianG]

I've tried clearing CMOS.
What settings in BIOS should I be looking for? I've tried power off push button settings at "immediate" and "after 4 sec" with no change.
My motherboard supplier said update to latest BIOS.
When I look at the Gigabyte site it says the latest BIOS "Support GIGABYTE On/Off Charge" whatever that means. Since it seemed to be related to power up, I downloaded it and installed. Since the original BIOS did the same thing I couldn't see much point in reverting to it.
You said "updating the BIOS is not a good idea unless you already have a problem" which is precisely what I have, and why I updated it.
Once the machine boots at the second attempt it runs normally for the rest of the day without problems. It's just the initial cold start that is the problem.