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Floppy disk(s) fail (80) and PC health status screen blank

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silk1976

IS-IT--Management
Mar 31, 2003
19
US
Hi -

Several months ago I purchased an Epox 8rda+ motherboard that I have been using with my Athlon XP 2100+ CPU. After a very rough start, I finally got everything going good - at least for a while.

Today I went to reboot the machine, and upon reboot, it came up and said &quot;floppy disk(s) fail (80)&quot;. I also noticed that the PC Health Status that shows voltages and temps is blank - ie, all the #'s are 0. The funny thing about that is that just about an hour before, I was in W2K and ran motherboard monitor and was able to see the temps of my system (BTW - both my system and CPU temp was < 40 C, so that pretty much removes heat as the problem).

I kinda had a similar problem with this mobo before when I first got it - the pc health status screen didn't show any numbers. I dont recall what I did to fix it (I think I just rebooted it a few times and left it alone for a while), but until now it hadn't been a problem.

If I hit f1 for the floppy failure, then the machine proceeds to boot into windows. During normal boot, everything looks good until the first screen appears with the scrolling bar. The status bar on the bottom gets to the point where the square is above the 't' in 'microsoft' before it just sits there. I've left it alone for 5-10 minutes with no luck. I can boot into safe mode with no problems.

Once I get into safe mode and look at the event log, I see a whole bunch of errors - mostly for network-related services dependant on other services that couldn't start. The first error (timewise) to show up once the event log service starts is event id 7001 and says &quot;the DHCP client depends on the WINS client (TCP/IP) which failed to start because of the following error: a device attached to the system is not functioning&quot;.

The coincidence of all these things happening at the same time makes me wonder if part of the mobo got fried somehow (I have the machine on a UPS which has saved it a time or two from a noticable split-second fluctuation of power in the house. And I dont recall any surges in power in the hour or so between seeing the temps in MBM and having the floppy/pc health status problem.) I'm assuming that MBM and the BIOS health status look at the same thing to determine status.

Any ideas? I'm figuring I just got a shot of bad luck and need a new motherboard, but the timing of all these problems makes me think that they all have a common culprit, and I'm hoping that maybe I can save myself the expense of a new motherboard :)
 
With the floppy drive check that the cable is seated at both ends correctly.
Also make sure that everything else is seated correctly, even any chips in sockets. Make sure that you are wearing an anti-stat wrist band that is correctly earthed when you do this. NEVER leave the power cable connected to the machine when working inside.
If none of this works, it does sound like your motherboard has a fault. It could be your BIOS. Try flashing it with the latest version, normally available for download from your motherboard manufacturers web site. I would use this as a last resort before getting a new board.
 
problem fixed. I tried flashing the BIOS with a bootable CD, but that didn't work. I went out to Microcenter and got another motherboard with the same nforce2 chipset (different manufacturer), plugged it in and boots like a charm.

 
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