Motherboard or hard drive problem

[vsmith30]

I am having a problem with my home built system. Gigabyte GA8KNXP, Intel Pentium 2.8, 1 Gigabyte of RAM. It ran fine for the first month. Then it began failing to boot. It didn't recognize my hard drives or my DVD drives and would hang on booting. I replaced the cable to the drives and it seemed to work for awhile and now its doing the same thing. If I power on & off repeatedly, eventually it will recognize the drives and boot. I have run diagnostics on the drives and they seem to be okay. Is this consistent with a motherboard problem? Any suggestions are appreciated. Thank you.

vsmith

 

[Dynamic1234]

Sounds like your motherboard is going bad on the primary and secondary IDE Connectors.

 

[allanon1965]

start out by trying to boot with only your main hard drive, no other drives, then if it boots normally and sees the drive, shut down and add the other drives one by one, see what happens....could be a failing power supply also...but try the drive thing first....

Fat, Drunk, and Stupid is no way to go through life Son.

 

[Crashman]

It sounds to me like a failing power supply, have you checked your voltage levels?

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[vsmith30]

Currently I have 4 hard drives 2 WD Raptor SATA drives and 2 Maxtor ATA IDE drives (also a DVD drive and A Sony DVD burner). My Power supply is a new Fortron 400W. If I disconnect the primary Slave IDE drive the system will boot more reliably but not always. I may have to power on & off several times. Is there a way to determine if the IDE channels are going bad? How can I know if the power supply is adequate? I am tempted to buy a larger power supply but hate to spend money needlessly. I'm a novice and truly appreciate all the advice.

vsmith

 

[Soldaten]

Hello;

As luck would have it, I had this problem too.

My System: ASUS P4C800 with Maxtor 60+ gig drives and onboard cache. Windows XP, lots of ram (not relevant for this problem) and a generic power supply I got at Fry's outpost.

Anyway, for what its worth, here is my 2 cents..

Its not likely that IDE ports are going to be intermittently bad. I say this based on my experience. But to check it, I swapped IDE cables and ports just to be sure. No change in problem so I concluded my statement holds true.

Its also not likely the hard disk is bad since you are able to recover it by a simple reboot of the machine. If the HDD was bad or had a bad onboard chip then this problem would not be as simple as a re-powering on of the system (usually).

I have a Fluke meter which allows me to monitor voltages
on any part of the system using various wires & clips. I am sure the techs here know what Im talkin about. After a few days of monitoring, I was able to capture a drop in voltage across the power supply which I believe led to my system not "seeing" the hard drive. I repeated this with similar results by opening the power supply and tweaking settings. I dont recommend you do this unless you have training and/or some sort of engineering degree.

So if I were you, I would replace the power supply because it certainly sounds to me as if your having the same exact problem. Otherwise if you start replacing components without understanding their interaction/relationships, you could end up costing yourself a lot of time and money.

good luck, sorry for the long winded message...

Soldaten

 

[vsmith30]

Thanks for your insight. I am going to replace the power supply tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes....
Just replaced the power supply with a new Antec TruePower 550 Watt power supply and the problem continues. I guess I'm dealing with a motherboard problem. Any other suggestions?<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by vsmith30 on 12/10/03 10:39 PM.</EM></FONT></P>