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Hard drive issue? Or worse? Help needed

D

DrCreep

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 13, 2003
Messages
153
Sunday night, while trying to move files (narrowed to my system drive on my primary master) the drive on the Primary Master would shut itself off and the machine would reboot. No errors or warning. The machine would boot into Windows just fine, and would stay stable as long as I wasn't doing any heavy disk work. (Surfing, AIM, Winamp, etc all worked fine, but copying and moving files would crash it)
Finally got my files off the drive and proceded to format and reload Win2k. Drive formatted just fine, and files would copy from the CD to the drive. In the install process, after formatting and copying, user is prompted to reboot. I rebooted, and received an error: "Error loading operating system", at the end of POST. (My post works as normal, counts mem, detects drives and such, scsi detect, and ATA raid detect, then boot).
I ended up last night removing all of my hard drives (including the suspected dead one) and tried using only one drive, an old 60G that wasn't in the system when all of this started.
I partitioned, formatted, and copied files.. but at the reboot I still got the same error message.
For installing Win2k, I disconnect the secondary IDE and the RAID. I use an IDE CDROM on secondary and my system drive on primary. I've tried getting my scsi card to boot for three years to no avail. This is a little ghetto, but it works.

At this point, everything appears to be normal, no bent pins, nothing visibly broken on the mobo. I haven't yet removed any cards to see if they have any impact (got too tired last night). I've been able to eliminate the hard drives as suspect by using a drive that wasn't in the machine before this started. The only things I'm thinking could be wrong right now are a possible video card issue, bad IDE controller, or something else on the motherboard has crapped out (CPU, RAM, etc).

I was curious if I could get some thoughts on this one. I've tried just about everything variable-wise that could have changed since it worked on Saturday. Would a BIOS flash would help? I haven't changed anything within the bios in quite some time, so this problem isn't direct result of me tinkering... things just sortof happened from the blue. I'm limited as to what I have to swap for testing, but that's my plan for tonight .. start swapping anything that can be swapped. Anyways, any ideas you have would be a big help.

Thanks everyone
-Doc


My system cofig:

Athlon XP2800
MSI K7N2 Delta ILSR
2x 512mb Corsair DDR400
Primary IDE 80Gb, 80Gb
Seondary IDE 200Gb, 200Gb
ATA Raid 200Gb
MSI GF4 4400 128mb
Hercules Gametheatre XP
Tekram DC390 SCSI
Pioneer 304s DVD ROM
Plextor 12/10/32 CD-RW
3COM 905TX 10/100 NIC
 
I've actually wondered if I was having power issues. Right before it hit the fan, I installed a system monitor program that came with my motherboard. The temps seemed ok, but the +12v rail was fluctuating at 11.28 to 11.35. I know there's somewhat of a variance, but I was concerned that it was a little low. I've got a Vantec 520 watt PSU, I would've thought it could handle all the stuff in the box.
On the other hand though, if the PSU was being stressed beyond limits, after I removed 4 of 5 hard drives, I would think it wouldn't be taxed enough to not let me put an OS on the machine. This of course, is unless there was permanent damage to the PSU or caused by defect.

I removed everything in the machine but the CDrom, one hard drive, motherboard, video and RAM and still ran into trouble. I'm going to try clearing CMOS tonight and possibly flashing the BIOS.

Another theory that I've been tossing around is that simply the IDE controller on the board has failed. My intended test on this would be to install a bootable IDE controller card. Only problem is that I haven't got a bootable controller card... so if one could be suggested, that would be very cool.

Ice Czar, thank you for the link... lots of good information within. Much appreciated.

-Doc
 
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