Hard drive, motherboard or simultaneous failure? [Hardware]

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From: Grinder on 25 Apr 2010 03:30

I've had a system in operation for several months built on an A7N8X-VM
motherboard. Quickly: an 80GB hard drive on the primary IDE channel,
and a CD-RW on the secondary; an AGP video card and a cheapie TV Tuner
rounded out the system that was mostly used to watch analog tv and
youtube videos. (Specifics on request)

The system now hangs on boot, right after the POST. I tore it down to a
minimum, and tried to find the failed component. I'm fairly confident
these observations are true:

1) If the hard drive, properly jumpered with a good cable, is plugged
into either IDE channel, the system will hang on boot. BIOS can see the
hard drive regardless of which channel it's on.

2) If the CD-RW, properly jumpered with a good cable, is plugged into
the secondary cable, BIOS can can see it and boot from it. If it's
plugged into the primary channel, it's invisible to BIOS and cannot be
used as a boot device. Swapping in a "known good" CD drive produces the
same results.

3) I can mount the hard drive, by way of a USB/ATI bridge, and make a
full backup without complaint. S.M.A.R.T. metrics do not indicate an
imminent failure.

It's hard for me to escape the conclusion that there's something wrong
with the motherboard, but what about the hard drive?

From: philo on 25 Apr 2010 06:06

From: Paul on 25 Apr 2010 07:58

Grinder wrote:
> I've had a system in operation for several months built on an A7N8X-VM
> motherboard. Quickly: an 80GB hard drive on the primary IDE channel,
> and a CD-RW on the secondary; an AGP video card and a cheapie TV Tuner
> rounded out the system that was mostly used to watch analog tv and
> youtube videos. (Specifics on request)
>
> The system now hangs on boot, right after the POST. I tore it down to a
> minimum, and tried to find the failed component. I'm fairly confident
> these observations are true:
>
> 1) If the hard drive, properly jumpered with a good cable, is plugged
> into either IDE channel, the system will hang on boot. BIOS can see the
> hard drive regardless of which channel it's on.
>
> 2) If the CD-RW, properly jumpered with a good cable, is plugged into
> the secondary cable, BIOS can can see it and boot from it. If it's
> plugged into the primary channel, it's invisible to BIOS and cannot be
> used as a boot device. Swapping in a "known good" CD drive produces the
> same results.
>
> 3) I can mount the hard drive, by way of a USB/ATI bridge, and make a
> full backup without complaint. S.M.A.R.T. metrics do not indicate an
> imminent failure.
>
> It's hard for me to escape the conclusion that there's something wrong
> with the motherboard, but what about the hard drive?

So the CD and the hard drive, are giving different results.
I'd want to run enough various test cases, so there is some
consistency.

For single drive testing, I take it you're using the end connector
for the single drive, and not the middle connector.

Since your CD boots, you can boot from a Linux LiveCD like Knoppix,
and give that a shot. Once booted, try accessing the hard drive, via
the icons on the desktop. Click the "Knoppix" icon just once, and inside
that, you'll see a few labels for the hard drive partitions. (Some partitions
will be named by the DOS label, others will only rate a size like
"25GB" or whatever. It takes a bit of guessing sometimes, to figure
out what partition you're looking at.) I use Knoppix for this purpose,
because Klaus does a good job of testing his software before shipping it.
I have plenty of other CDs, having one problem or another.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html

I think this is the last one I downloaded. 721,999,872 bytes.
The first time I tried to burn one of these, my ancient burner
wouldn't burn something that big. So the first Knoppix CD cost
me a new burner :-) Nero will convert a downloaded ISO, into a
bootable CD. There are some free burner utilities that will
do that as well.

ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/knoppix/KNOPPIX_V6.2.1CD-2010-01-31-EN.iso

Paul

From: GlowingBlueMist on 25 Apr 2010 13:28

On 4/25/2010 2:30 AM, Grinder wrote:
> I've had a system in operation for several months built on an A7N8X-VM
> motherboard. Quickly: an 80GB hard drive on the primary IDE channel, and
> a CD-RW on the secondary; an AGP video card and a cheapie TV Tuner
> rounded out the system that was mostly used to watch analog tv and
> youtube videos. (Specifics on request)
>
> The system now hangs on boot, right after the POST. I tore it down to a
> minimum, and tried to find the failed component. I'm fairly confident
> these observations are true:
>
> 1) If the hard drive, properly jumpered with a good cable, is plugged
> into either IDE channel, the system will hang on boot. BIOS can see the
> hard drive regardless of which channel it's on.
>
> 2) If the CD-RW, properly jumpered with a good cable, is plugged into
> the secondary cable, BIOS can can see it and boot from it. If it's
> plugged into the primary channel, it's invisible to BIOS and cannot be
> used as a boot device. Swapping in a "known good" CD drive produces the
> same results.
>
> 3) I can mount the hard drive, by way of a USB/ATI bridge, and make a
> full backup without complaint. S.M.A.R.T. metrics do not indicate an
> imminent failure.
>
> It's hard for me to escape the conclusion that there's something wrong
> with the motherboard, but what about the hard drive?

I agree with the suggestions you have had by the others.
What I would add would be to reset the BIOS to factory default using the
motherboard jumper or if the BIOS has a screen option that says
something like default or safe load I'd try that and see what happens.

If your computer's memory is more than one module, try swapping the
modules and see if the symptoms change with the memory modules in a slot
different than what you started with.

Being able to use a program to copy the files from the suspect drive
does not ensure that it is bootable unless the copy from it will will
boot, something you can't test with what you have told us about your
system so far. The Master Boot Record might be bad on the drive. Here
is a link that explains this as well as methods on how to fix it for XP
and Vista.

http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/fix-mbr-xp-vista/

From: Grinder on 25 Apr 2010 16:57

On 4/25/2010 5:06 AM, philo wrote:
> Grinder wrote:
>> I've had a system in operation for several months built on an A7N8X-VM
>> motherboard. Quickly: an 80GB hard drive on the primary IDE channel,
>> and a CD-RW on the secondary; an AGP video card and a cheapie TV Tuner
>> rounded out the system that was mostly used to watch analog tv and
>> youtube videos. (Specifics on request)
>>
>> The system now hangs on boot, right after the POST. I tore it down to
>> a minimum, and tried to find the failed component. I'm fairly
>> confident these observations are true:
>>
>> 1) If the hard drive, properly jumpered with a good cable, is plugged
>> into either IDE channel, the system will hang on boot. BIOS can see
>> the hard drive regardless of which channel it's on.
>>
>> 2) If the CD-RW, properly jumpered with a good cable, is plugged into
>> the secondary cable, BIOS can can see it and boot from it. If it's
>> plugged into the primary channel, it's invisible to BIOS and cannot be
>> used as a boot device. Swapping in a "known good" CD drive produces
>> the same results.
>>
>> 3) I can mount the hard drive, by way of a USB/ATI bridge, and make a
>> full backup without complaint. S.M.A.R.T. metrics do not indicate an
>> imminent failure.
>>
>> It's hard for me to escape the conclusion that there's something wrong
>> with the motherboard, but what about the hard drive?
>
> Well, it's seems that the primary IDE channel is bad
>
> try disabling it in the bios and see if you can get the system to boot
> from the HD when placed on the secondary channel
>
> note: some HD's have a different jumper setting for master:
>
> master with slave
>
> or master with no other drive present

Done, with no effect.

> try removing the jumper
> or setting for cable select

Done, with no effect.

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