schleeb
asked on
No drives, HDD or CD-ROM are recognized by the BIOS, yet the drives are good.
OK, I don't get stumped often. But I could use some help on this one. Here's the hardware:
ASUS A7N266-e MOBO, 512K RAM, Promise Technologies Medley Ultra 133 EIDE PCI card (it's fine...) N-Vidia GeForce 3, 128 MB video card. Three hard drives. Western Digital 120Mb (Boot Drive), 80 Mb Maxtor, 200 Mb Western Digital (for backups), a DVD-RW and a DVD-ROM. Dazzle II video MPEG card, PCI LAN card, USB 2.0 PCI card. All PCI slots are full... Power supply is a 180 Watt Antec.
Here's whats been happening. First a little history. All was well UNTIL... my son gave me his old (working) Maxtor 13 Gb drive for me to sell on E-Bay. So I thought I'd better erase it first. As soon as I hooked it up things went down hill. First I thought it had a virus on it or something though it had been "erased" using WinXP. The computer was having a hard time recognizing it. In the process I "hot plugged" the drive onto my IDE bus to get the computer to recognize it. I've done this many times in the past without any ill effects. Computer then started crashing after that. So... genius me figured I'd gotten a virus that my AVG Anti Virus wouldn't detect. So I unplugged my drives hooked to the PCI IDE drive controller so I only had the 80 Gb boot drive and the CD-ROM drive running on the MOBO controller. Then I reformatted my 80 Gb Maxtor and reinstalled WinXP. Everything seemed fine. Then I connected the aforementioned disconnected drives that were hooked up to the PCI IDE card plugged them in and rebooted. And it started acting up again... spontaneous resets and "delayed write failures". Figured a virus might have been on one of these other two drives... and they had now reinfected by boot drive, even though they had been scanned clean by AVG Anti Virus.
Now after all of this... my BIOS will not recognize any drives connected to the MOBO IDE bus. HDD or CD-ROM. So I'm booting from my PCI IDE drive controller. It works fine but... I keep getting a "delayed write failure" when I transfer files from my "D" drive to my "C" drive. Tried several published solutions for that problem... but it persists. Even tried turning off System Restore which didn't help. So, I've disconnected the "D" drive such that I only have the "C" drive and a CD-ROM connected to the PCI IDE card. Thinking the "D" drive was flaky. Now... everything boots just fine except the computer won't run for more than about 15 to 20 minutes before doing a spontaneous reset. It just goes, BLINK, and gives a blank screen then reboots. Reboots just fine... I checked the power supply and the only thing I see is that the 5.0 Volt section is down a little to 4.8 Volts. Doesn't matter how many drive power plugs are connected. Still 4.8 Volts.
It's down to decision time. I know all the drives are OK because they work on the PIC IDE card. Nothing is recognized by the BIOS as far as the IDE buses. Don't understand the computer resetting or write failure issues. My two guesses are...
The power supply is pooped out from having all PCI slots in use and 3 HDD and 2 CD-ROM drives connected for the last few years and then connecting a 4th drive... Though I thought all the drives ran off the 12 Volt section not the 5 Volt... or my IDE controller on the MOBO is shot from the hot plugging incident. Though with it disabled you wouldn't think that would be an issue and certainly not something that would cause the MOBO to reset... Anyone have any suggestions as to how to continue? Is this a rare double failure issue... bad power supply and a bad MOBO IDE controller?
ASUS A7N266-e MOBO, 512K RAM, Promise Technologies Medley Ultra 133 EIDE PCI card (it's fine...) N-Vidia GeForce 3, 128 MB video card. Three hard drives. Western Digital 120Mb (Boot Drive), 80 Mb Maxtor, 200 Mb Western Digital (for backups), a DVD-RW and a DVD-ROM. Dazzle II video MPEG card, PCI LAN card, USB 2.0 PCI card. All PCI slots are full... Power supply is a 180 Watt Antec.
Here's whats been happening. First a little history. All was well UNTIL... my son gave me his old (working) Maxtor 13 Gb drive for me to sell on E-Bay. So I thought I'd better erase it first. As soon as I hooked it up things went down hill. First I thought it had a virus on it or something though it had been "erased" using WinXP. The computer was having a hard time recognizing it. In the process I "hot plugged" the drive onto my IDE bus to get the computer to recognize it. I've done this many times in the past without any ill effects. Computer then started crashing after that. So... genius me figured I'd gotten a virus that my AVG Anti Virus wouldn't detect. So I unplugged my drives hooked to the PCI IDE drive controller so I only had the 80 Gb boot drive and the CD-ROM drive running on the MOBO controller. Then I reformatted my 80 Gb Maxtor and reinstalled WinXP. Everything seemed fine. Then I connected the aforementioned disconnected drives that were hooked up to the PCI IDE card plugged them in and rebooted. And it started acting up again... spontaneous resets and "delayed write failures". Figured a virus might have been on one of these other two drives... and they had now reinfected by boot drive, even though they had been scanned clean by AVG Anti Virus.
Now after all of this... my BIOS will not recognize any drives connected to the MOBO IDE bus. HDD or CD-ROM. So I'm booting from my PCI IDE drive controller. It works fine but... I keep getting a "delayed write failure" when I transfer files from my "D" drive to my "C" drive. Tried several published solutions for that problem... but it persists. Even tried turning off System Restore which didn't help. So, I've disconnected the "D" drive such that I only have the "C" drive and a CD-ROM connected to the PCI IDE card. Thinking the "D" drive was flaky. Now... everything boots just fine except the computer won't run for more than about 15 to 20 minutes before doing a spontaneous reset. It just goes, BLINK, and gives a blank screen then reboots. Reboots just fine... I checked the power supply and the only thing I see is that the 5.0 Volt section is down a little to 4.8 Volts. Doesn't matter how many drive power plugs are connected. Still 4.8 Volts.
It's down to decision time. I know all the drives are OK because they work on the PIC IDE card. Nothing is recognized by the BIOS as far as the IDE buses. Don't understand the computer resetting or write failure issues. My two guesses are...
The power supply is pooped out from having all PCI slots in use and 3 HDD and 2 CD-ROM drives connected for the last few years and then connecting a 4th drive... Though I thought all the drives ran off the 12 Volt section not the 5 Volt... or my IDE controller on the MOBO is shot from the hot plugging incident. Though with it disabled you wouldn't think that would be an issue and certainly not something that would cause the MOBO to reset... Anyone have any suggestions as to how to continue? Is this a rare double failure issue... bad power supply and a bad MOBO IDE controller?
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It supprises me that your system ever worked. A 180 Watt powersupply for 3 Disks (You changed them from GB to MB, the ram from MB to KB, but no worries) and 2 optical drives. Your grafics card isn't exactly of the low power type either, and all slots are used up. I suggest you get yourself a good PSU, get something around 400Watt. Those things aren't too expensive. Then try again.
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cant you add the drives manually in the bios? also get another PSU, its seriously overloaded from what you say you are running,
Cheers
Cof
Cheers
Cof
I am also going to have to agree with rindi, a 180 Watt power supply is enough to power 1 drive only you must have a slimline or low profile case. But a 250 watt power supply should be more then enough. I have a 300 watt and am running 3 hard drives 2 dvd drives and a cdr. As far as the overheat from parkerig thats allso a possiblity - after 10 mins see if the power supply is blowing HOT not warm air and feel the drives. I dont think its a virus issue, but you cant be to careful check a online free scan.
just out of curiousity (in hindsight) why didnt you either ask him to erase it or disconnect your drive and connect his....
just out of curiousity (in hindsight) why didnt you either ask him to erase it or disconnect your drive and connect his....
It could be heat related.
Get a house fan and have it blowing air over the open PC.
Let me know if it runs for longer than the aforementioned 15 to 20 mins
Ian