This is an interesting scenario for any and all techs looking for something utterly new. I'm a tech these last 8 years and I'm stumped.
The system:
Via P4XB-SA motherboard
400W power supply
I was trying to fix a problem with the machine rebooting ... everytime it was shut down it blue screened..... the stop error message was very similar to one associated with an EZCD Creator issue so I tried uninstalling EZCD creator and voilla, no more blue screen. Hooray.... now all I needed to do is put back the peripherals that were installed before I began my investigation ..... like the soundcard and network card..and swap the video card (client preference).
The video card that was currently in the machine was a Matrox and it worked fine. I stupidly decided to make all of the changes at once without checking the bios and I'm sure nobody will be surprised to hear it didn't boot .... it didn't even get far enough into the post to recognize the hard drives. It froze up immediately after checking the system RAM. There was one short beep early on (before the monitor had come up with a diplay) but no other audio indicators. The changes I'd made were:
- Swapped the Matrox display adapter for an ATI card that had worked in that machine previously.
- Put the NIC back into machine (again it'd worked there before).
- Put the Creative Labs Soundblaster Live card back (it'd also been working on that machine before).
- Lastly I added a zip drive to the primary ribbon cable with the zip set to be the slave device. The primary ide device was an 80GB ATA100 drive from IBM. It had been working fine in this machine and was only installed about 2 months ago after the inital hard drive failed. Note: the initial hard drive had gone bad in an odd way ... it wouldn't power up quickly enough for the POST to register it as present during a cold boot, but if you went into the BIOS and ran the utility to recognize the drives, it'd be there and you could do a warm boot from the bios and boot onto the problem drive without any trouble.
At this point I do the what I should have done before and started making one change at a time.... I pulled the nic and soundcard leaving the pci and iso slots all empty except for the pci ATI display adapter (I can't remember which model sorry) and nothing in the agp slot at all. I left the zip drive connected and rebooted the machine and exactly the same thing happened - it froze right after the memory test. I tried it again without the zip drive attached but there was no change. So I swapped the ATI video card out replacing it with the agp matrox that had been in that machine earlier that day. The computer was able to POST but now it's telling me I have no IDE devices on the primary IDE controller at all. At this point I was back where I started .... the machine should have been bootable because it was in exactly the same configuration that it had been when I was fixing the problem shutting down. Yet, now it won't boot and it says the primary master drive doesn't exist. Inspection of the primary master indicates it's not spinning up like it should... Repeated tests aren't even causing the drive to get/stay warm... I can feel a vibration in the drive so something is spinning in there but I can't say what. It appears that the drive could be malfunctioning similarly to the manner in which the first one had.
I'm wondering whether the ati card could have caused the problem; if it or the zip drive could have fried the hard drives electronic interface to such an extent that enough power no longer goes to the drive. Like I said I'm stumped..... anybody seen anything like this before?
markoff
The system:
Via P4XB-SA motherboard
400W power supply
I was trying to fix a problem with the machine rebooting ... everytime it was shut down it blue screened..... the stop error message was very similar to one associated with an EZCD Creator issue so I tried uninstalling EZCD creator and voilla, no more blue screen. Hooray.... now all I needed to do is put back the peripherals that were installed before I began my investigation ..... like the soundcard and network card..and swap the video card (client preference).
The video card that was currently in the machine was a Matrox and it worked fine. I stupidly decided to make all of the changes at once without checking the bios and I'm sure nobody will be surprised to hear it didn't boot .... it didn't even get far enough into the post to recognize the hard drives. It froze up immediately after checking the system RAM. There was one short beep early on (before the monitor had come up with a diplay) but no other audio indicators. The changes I'd made were:
- Swapped the Matrox display adapter for an ATI card that had worked in that machine previously.
- Put the NIC back into machine (again it'd worked there before).
- Put the Creative Labs Soundblaster Live card back (it'd also been working on that machine before).
- Lastly I added a zip drive to the primary ribbon cable with the zip set to be the slave device. The primary ide device was an 80GB ATA100 drive from IBM. It had been working fine in this machine and was only installed about 2 months ago after the inital hard drive failed. Note: the initial hard drive had gone bad in an odd way ... it wouldn't power up quickly enough for the POST to register it as present during a cold boot, but if you went into the BIOS and ran the utility to recognize the drives, it'd be there and you could do a warm boot from the bios and boot onto the problem drive without any trouble.
At this point I do the what I should have done before and started making one change at a time.... I pulled the nic and soundcard leaving the pci and iso slots all empty except for the pci ATI display adapter (I can't remember which model sorry) and nothing in the agp slot at all. I left the zip drive connected and rebooted the machine and exactly the same thing happened - it froze right after the memory test. I tried it again without the zip drive attached but there was no change. So I swapped the ATI video card out replacing it with the agp matrox that had been in that machine earlier that day. The computer was able to POST but now it's telling me I have no IDE devices on the primary IDE controller at all. At this point I was back where I started .... the machine should have been bootable because it was in exactly the same configuration that it had been when I was fixing the problem shutting down. Yet, now it won't boot and it says the primary master drive doesn't exist. Inspection of the primary master indicates it's not spinning up like it should... Repeated tests aren't even causing the drive to get/stay warm... I can feel a vibration in the drive so something is spinning in there but I can't say what. It appears that the drive could be malfunctioning similarly to the manner in which the first one had.
I'm wondering whether the ati card could have caused the problem; if it or the zip drive could have fried the hard drives electronic interface to such an extent that enough power no longer goes to the drive. Like I said I'm stumped..... anybody seen anything like this before?
markoff
