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I have a very confusing technical problem that I am hoping someone could shed some light on.
I’m running a clone system using a Tyan Trinity and an AMD T-bird 1.2GHz CPU. Everything has been running fine for several months until I attempted to upgrade my 2 old 128MB PC100 DIMMs to a single 512MB PC133 DIMM.

When the new DIMM was installed the system would automatically reboot once it reached the Windows 2000 login screen. I removed the new RAM and re-installed the old RAM, which allowed me to boot the system. Everything was working ok for about 24 hours then the problems started. The CPU fan stopped running, which caused the system to re-boot and the freeze in BIOS. The fan was ok, but the power connector (on the motherboard) for the fan had failed. I connected the fan to a different connector and the system came back up. It then automatically rebooted while in use. I heard the primary hard drive spin down while in use right before the reboot. After the re-boot, the system's BIOS would no longer detect any of the IDE devices connected to it. I replaced the motherboard with an ABIT KT7 RAID, and still it would not detect the IDE devices. I also upgraded the power supply to 400W to make sure I had enough power for what I was running and replaced the CPU to be sure that it did not over heat. Still no luck, partial boot, then restart, then BIOS looses all IDE devices.

When I change the IDE configuration by moving a drive, changing a cable, or clearing the BIOS the hard drive is detected, then fails. Sometimes it gets to Windows then re-boots, some times it fails while loading, other times the BIOS wont detect the Hard drive at all. After any one of these failures the IDE devices absent from the BIOS. I have also tried running just the primary hard drive and a CD-ROM, booting from CD-ROM and reinstall re-installing Win2k, but with no luck.

If anyone has experienced anything like this, please help. I’m at a loss for ideas and out of $.

Thanks a lot,

Chris



<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by cml0219 on 04/30/01 03:36 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
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That seems to have done the trick!
The system has auto rebooted once so far, but is doing better than before.

Below is a new message I posted about the current state of things.
Thanks again, I don’t know why this worked, but it did. The only other thing I changed was to make the boot drive stand alone on the IDE channel. I’m wondering if my current problems are due to the AMD’s KT-133 chipset having a problem with large amounts of IDE I/O traffic.

I’ve been having problems booting off of IDE drives in a clone Win2K box. The motherboard looses the IDE devices and shuts down drives causing a reboot while Windows is running.

After replacing Motherboard, CPU, and power supplies, the thing that fixed it was installing an old 15GB hard drive (standard IDE, not ATA66 or 100).

The problem is:
The system still reboots during HDD intensive activities such a virus scan, coping large groups of files, or multiple PCs accessing its data. All of these operations work ok if they are done slowly. For example scanning one HDD at a time, or copying a small group of files.

Here is the config:
I’m thinking this may be a AMD chipset problem, I’ve always used Intel, this is my first AMD since the 486 days.

My fist guess as to the problem was power this was all running off of a 400W ATX PS, I upgraded the power supply to Dual 400W PS, but with no luck.

AMD T-bird 1.2GHz (ATX 400W AMD Approved PS powers the Motherboard)
256MB PC100 RAM (2-dimms)
ATI RADEON 64MB DDR video (this video card sucks!)
IBM Deskstar 15GB (Standard IDE) 36” Standard IDE cable (Master on IDE 1) (ATX PS1)
Seagate 30GB ATA66 (slave on IDE 2) (24” ATA100 cable) – no I’m not woried about speed, just stability (AT PS1)
TDK 16X IDE CD-Recorder (Master on IDE 2) (AT PS2)
Four 80GB Maxtor ATA100 drives on a Fast Track ATA100 controller. Two are using a 18” ATA100 cable, the other two are using a 24” ATA100 cable. (2 on PS1 2 on PS2)
Panasonic DVD-RAM on a SCSI controller (AT PS2)
Netgear 10/100 card, SB Live, SIG SCSI card
Four large case fans (AT PS2)
All hard drives are in removable IDE cages with cooling fans.