- Nov 25, 2013
- 3
- 0
- 10,520
At wit's end, needing some help/suggestions on where to go next with this.
First, the system:
Core 2 DUO E6600 2.4Ghz
MSI Platinum 975X Powerup Edition
2x 1GB DDR II Corsair Ballistix
Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB
1x EIDE HDD (200GB)
3x SATA II HDD (320GB, 500GB, 1TB)
1x CD/DVD ROM
750W Power Supply
While playing around with the drives during my last Windows installs (dual boot between XP/7) I settled in on a multi-partition RAID 0 setup for the OS and the same for a couple of other drives. Unfortunately, because of my "Hey, this is neat" and subsequent procrastination, I'm now in quite a bind as I can't do anything with this system right now.
Now the backstory/symptoms:
4 days ago, the monitors were in standby, the system was on.. moved the mouse to use it and nothing. Tapped a couple of keys, no response. Checked num-lock and it's locked-on. Hit the reset button on the front, still nothing. Held the power button in for a few seconds, still nothing. On to the kill-switch on the PSU, all goes quiet.
Fired the system back up after waiting about 60 seconds, nothing on-screen, no beeps, system runs for a few seconds, then power-cycles itself. This power-cycle is typical of this motherboard if the BIOS is reset or if there's a hardware change (or reset if you screw up your manual settings). After this, I just shut it down until last night.
What's been done:
I've gutted the system. After pulling each component, I tried starting. Each time, no beep code, no system response.. it either hangs and does nothing or gave me a single never-ending beep from the PC speaker. After stripping it down to nothing but the CPU, it finally responded with a standard 1 long 2 short code: No video. Dropped the video card back in and it started posting with the single beep of happiness and displaying all that it should on-screen.
Piece by piece, the system was rebuilt. Same result right up until the hard drives were reconnected, then things went sideways. The system posts about 80% of the time now, however when it does it fails to boot. After pressing F1 to continue (BIOS fails to find floppy, pauses due to this 'error' - This is intentional), the screen blanks, the cursor blinks at the top left and that's the end of all activity.
When it fails to post, it simply fails to do anything.. everything spins up and everything sounds normal (no sounds of struggling fans or drives). ROM fires up and blinks, HDD light gives its standard couple of flashes. Screen goes to black and again, nothing.
Interestingly enough, if I move the RAM from one slot to another (for troubleshooting I'm only using one stick - I've tried each stick in each slot, one by one by one with no results in terms of booting the system up), the system does start posting again without having to clear the BIOS.
The only things I haven't done yet are re-seating the CPU and trying another power supply (though for the PSU, I have swapped the rails around in hopes of a problematic chain, but no luck as of yet.
Anyone have any suggestions as to what can be tried next? An upgrade IS on the horizon (2-3 months, planned before this system went down) but my concern is two-fold; A) Dropping unnecessary funds on an old system, delaying the aforementioned upgrade and B) Like anyone, there's data on these drives that I need to be able to recover.
Appreciate everyone's time in reading this and I look forward to any suggestions put forward.
D.
First, the system:
Core 2 DUO E6600 2.4Ghz
MSI Platinum 975X Powerup Edition
2x 1GB DDR II Corsair Ballistix
Gigabyte GTS 250 1GB
1x EIDE HDD (200GB)
3x SATA II HDD (320GB, 500GB, 1TB)
1x CD/DVD ROM
750W Power Supply
While playing around with the drives during my last Windows installs (dual boot between XP/7) I settled in on a multi-partition RAID 0 setup for the OS and the same for a couple of other drives. Unfortunately, because of my "Hey, this is neat" and subsequent procrastination, I'm now in quite a bind as I can't do anything with this system right now.
Now the backstory/symptoms:
4 days ago, the monitors were in standby, the system was on.. moved the mouse to use it and nothing. Tapped a couple of keys, no response. Checked num-lock and it's locked-on. Hit the reset button on the front, still nothing. Held the power button in for a few seconds, still nothing. On to the kill-switch on the PSU, all goes quiet.
Fired the system back up after waiting about 60 seconds, nothing on-screen, no beeps, system runs for a few seconds, then power-cycles itself. This power-cycle is typical of this motherboard if the BIOS is reset or if there's a hardware change (or reset if you screw up your manual settings). After this, I just shut it down until last night.
What's been done:
I've gutted the system. After pulling each component, I tried starting. Each time, no beep code, no system response.. it either hangs and does nothing or gave me a single never-ending beep from the PC speaker. After stripping it down to nothing but the CPU, it finally responded with a standard 1 long 2 short code: No video. Dropped the video card back in and it started posting with the single beep of happiness and displaying all that it should on-screen.
Piece by piece, the system was rebuilt. Same result right up until the hard drives were reconnected, then things went sideways. The system posts about 80% of the time now, however when it does it fails to boot. After pressing F1 to continue (BIOS fails to find floppy, pauses due to this 'error' - This is intentional), the screen blanks, the cursor blinks at the top left and that's the end of all activity.
When it fails to post, it simply fails to do anything.. everything spins up and everything sounds normal (no sounds of struggling fans or drives). ROM fires up and blinks, HDD light gives its standard couple of flashes. Screen goes to black and again, nothing.
Interestingly enough, if I move the RAM from one slot to another (for troubleshooting I'm only using one stick - I've tried each stick in each slot, one by one by one with no results in terms of booting the system up), the system does start posting again without having to clear the BIOS.
The only things I haven't done yet are re-seating the CPU and trying another power supply (though for the PSU, I have swapped the rails around in hopes of a problematic chain, but no luck as of yet.
Anyone have any suggestions as to what can be tried next? An upgrade IS on the horizon (2-3 months, planned before this system went down) but my concern is two-fold; A) Dropping unnecessary funds on an old system, delaying the aforementioned upgrade and B) Like anyone, there's data on these drives that I need to be able to recover.
Appreciate everyone's time in reading this and I look forward to any suggestions put forward.
D.
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