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Bad Motherboard?
A friend (yes, the proverbial friend) has an old Presario 5461 that recently locked up.
Upon cycling the power, it tersely informed her of its' inability to find a boot device. CMOS showed no hard drives. Boots from floppy just fine. Sees and reads CD on other channel just fine.
Quick examination of hard drive reveals it is stone cold - it's not powering up.
Put drive in another box. Nope. Dead as a door nail. Defunct. Expired. Deceased.
Brief examination of drive (kinda like the obligatory, pointless gaze into the engine compartment of a car by one who's technically challenged by intermittent wipers) reveals a seldom seen (well, for me) burst blister about 2mm in diameter on the surface of one of the chips on the drive's circuit board. The blister is right at one edge of the chip and three adjacent chip pin to board trace junctions are charred.
Hokay, drive committed ritual sepuku.
(All together now: Bad Chip, Bad Chip, Whatcha Gonna Do)
Put another drive in.
It spins up, but the BIOS doesn't see it.
I try several drives, several cables (EIDE all, it's a 5 year old Presario, afterall), both channels.
BIOS steadfastly refuses to accept the existence of any HDD on amy cable on any channel.
CD, however, works just fine on said channels.
So, is it safe (and reasonable) to presume localized motherboard failure induced by the self-immolating drive?
If that's the case, why would a CD work? Is there really that much of a difference between the sub-controller activities of the two?
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by: SnowguyPosted on 2003-07-09 at 19:26:24ID: 8890504
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