A8N-SLI failing halfway thu initiallising

[stumax]

Hi guys, this is my first post, just found this forum last night in desperation. I have an A8N-SLI motherboard, Athlon64 X2, 6100GT with 4 x 1024 Corsair ram, running XP64 which has been rock solid for nearly 18 months. It's a bare bones system I use for heavy number crunching - I do a lot of CFD analysis with it, hence the 4GB RAM. Last week I was burning a DVD and it stopped halfway. I rebooted using hardware off switch and now it won't even get to booting, it stops thru the system initiallising, right where it lists the PCI devices and their IRQ's, actually it gets to the ACPI device every time then stops. A reset will start it again straight away, it's not locked up, but again, it hangs there. I tried removing the DVD burner, removing the graphics card and installing an old PCI one, no change. I tried a different power supply which works on another system, no change. The memory checks out OK at the start. I don't have any other DDR ram to install so I can't try that, unfortunately, but I doubt that is the cause. I'm guessing it's the motherboard, which is a bummer because I will then have to buy a new one as well as RAM and CPU as you just can't get S939 boards anymore. How can a motherboard suddenly go from working 100% to not? If anyone can help I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

Stu.

 

[roadrunner197069]

Possibly a corrupt hard drive. Download and run test from your HDD manufacturer.

 

[stumax]

I checked the HDD on another PC - it's fine. It doesn't even get to the point of accessing the HDD, just stops whilst checking the hardware.

 

[roadrunner197069]

I fixed one yesterday with almost exactly the same problem and it is the same board and the Hard drive was corrupt.

 

[stumax]

Ahh, well spotted. I just tried the HDD in the other PC using it to boot with. Got nothing. Tried an old HDD with win98 on it in the A8N-SLI and it booted OK, so the motherboard etc looks to be OK. If I use the other HDD in another PC as a slave I can read it OK, it check out fine. Perhaps the boot sector is corrupted? Anyone know how to fix this without wiping the whole disk? Thanks!
Stu.

 

[roadrunner197069]

You can try to boot from cd and do a repair. It didnt work for me but my customers crashed because the electric company pulled the meter outside while they were playing a game. I tested their Hitachi drive with Hitachis tools and it was bad. Hitachi tools couldnt fix it. I did manage to slave it and get Vista 64 to reinstall and everything seems to work but i still get errors when testing it with Hitachi tools. I had my customer buy themselves a new one just to be sure. $50 labor and $90 for the HDD. The new HDD only cost me $64, I gotta make money to. I also sent the old one back under warranty so now I have another Hard drive to start a new build. Woot.

 

[stumax]

Thanks for the help! I'm halfway thru a system repair, it seems to be working. If I'd waited an hour or so before going out to the computer shop thismorning I would have saved the money I spent on a new motherboard, CPU and RAM, oh well, I can add another node to the cluster now!

cheers,

Stu.

 

[roadrunner197069]

Your welcome. Good luck.