Likely Controller Or Harddrive?
Hiya guys, i've got an Abit af7-s v.2; it's pretty well o.c'd, pc3700, XP2500 oc'd up to 420 fsb, etc.. it's run great like this, i'm an electronic technician, i monitor heat, etc;
Here's what happened. The box has run with a 440 and a 430 fsb before; recently with not aming so much i dropped the fsb to 420. Still no problems.
Machine had been running fine. Couple of nights ago i was sitting there web surfing and the machine just crapped out and reset. Upon restart, got message "no 80 pin cable connected"; Then, i stuck in a winxp upgrade disc. It said, no windows installation detected. Hmm. Went into bios... hard drive detected, then not detected in bios, back and forth, till at this point, i've got no detection of either cdrom, or hard drive. When i try to respin up i'll get one of two messages: boot volume missing or something like that, and blue screen white type, windows has been shut down to protect your machine.
Alternately, i get large white letters saying no system disk, insert disk into A: and hit enter.
Now lets see.. when it died the first time, i defragged it and the beginning and ending results were the same: huge chunk of the disk ws obviously undefragmented, yet it said i didnt' need to defrag. (disk was well kept and never had fragmentation problems.)So what i did was had it do a chkdsk and restarted. It detected just hundreds of errors, claimed to be fixing, or trying to fix, but it would still restart, then crash again. The crashing got faster and faster till it wouldn't load windows any more
Hmmm.... grabbed an old win98 disk i have lying around, had it do a scandisk. Halfway through, said long filename error, couldn't proceed.
Oh yes one other thing: When i could restart windows, it would start, then claim "lsass. error wrong value placed into a .... and i cant remember what it said.
I grabbed an old 13.5 gig harddrive i had lying around, and put it on. same thing at this point: no disks recognized on the ide in bios.
I know it might sound confusing but i messed with it a long time: it basically is a restart with the lsass. error, stating a wrong value placed in a registry ... then the massivly fragmented volume; upon restarts, since the original chkdsk never finished, i'd get huge numbers of errored files, it would attempt to fix, then eventually try to restart. But coming up to the ''Welcome, Owner" screen i'd see lsass error etc.
Eventually, it wouldnt even get that far, and the hard drive relay would click*click*click*click* until i reset. Then i let it sit and restarted, no relay clicking, but the blue screen with the
'boot volume unmountable windows has been shut down to protect your machine'
Until finally, no recognition of anything, in bios. At first, it would recognize the second drive i had swapped out in bios, but it wouldn't start windows completely but would give me the 'boot volume unmountable' or, the 'no system disk warning.
I didn't consider it was going to get this bad or i'd have paid a little bit more attention.
Question is, is it likely the controller has died, or what? I know it's hard to be specific, but what i'm looking for is some "if it's the controller then it'll do this or that, hard drive, this or that;"
years ago i did some pc teching before i went into wireless commms so i'm not exactly a noob but it has been a long time since i troubleshot boards.
What i'm suspecting is: power supply, ( 12 volt rail is 1.8 but it's run like that for like a year) then more likely, hard drive, then controller;
but the not recognizing even the cdrom on the cable, and not on ide 1 or 2, changed cables, etc, still same thing... ouch. I'm thinking perhaps controller, but why if it was the controller would the windows crash with the massively fragmented volume, massive bad files on chkdsk....
it's been so long since i had to think about this sort of thing i'd really like to hear what you guys suspect as most likely, and why. Thanks a lot in advance.
Here's what happened. The box has run with a 440 and a 430 fsb before; recently with not aming so much i dropped the fsb to 420. Still no problems.
Machine had been running fine. Couple of nights ago i was sitting there web surfing and the machine just crapped out and reset. Upon restart, got message "no 80 pin cable connected"; Then, i stuck in a winxp upgrade disc. It said, no windows installation detected. Hmm. Went into bios... hard drive detected, then not detected in bios, back and forth, till at this point, i've got no detection of either cdrom, or hard drive. When i try to respin up i'll get one of two messages: boot volume missing or something like that, and blue screen white type, windows has been shut down to protect your machine.
Alternately, i get large white letters saying no system disk, insert disk into A: and hit enter.
Now lets see.. when it died the first time, i defragged it and the beginning and ending results were the same: huge chunk of the disk ws obviously undefragmented, yet it said i didnt' need to defrag. (disk was well kept and never had fragmentation problems.)So what i did was had it do a chkdsk and restarted. It detected just hundreds of errors, claimed to be fixing, or trying to fix, but it would still restart, then crash again. The crashing got faster and faster till it wouldn't load windows any more
Hmmm.... grabbed an old win98 disk i have lying around, had it do a scandisk. Halfway through, said long filename error, couldn't proceed.
Oh yes one other thing: When i could restart windows, it would start, then claim "lsass. error wrong value placed into a .... and i cant remember what it said.
I grabbed an old 13.5 gig harddrive i had lying around, and put it on. same thing at this point: no disks recognized on the ide in bios.
I know it might sound confusing but i messed with it a long time: it basically is a restart with the lsass. error, stating a wrong value placed in a registry ... then the massivly fragmented volume; upon restarts, since the original chkdsk never finished, i'd get huge numbers of errored files, it would attempt to fix, then eventually try to restart. But coming up to the ''Welcome, Owner" screen i'd see lsass error etc.
Eventually, it wouldnt even get that far, and the hard drive relay would click*click*click*click* until i reset. Then i let it sit and restarted, no relay clicking, but the blue screen with the
'boot volume unmountable windows has been shut down to protect your machine'
Until finally, no recognition of anything, in bios. At first, it would recognize the second drive i had swapped out in bios, but it wouldn't start windows completely but would give me the 'boot volume unmountable' or, the 'no system disk warning.
I didn't consider it was going to get this bad or i'd have paid a little bit more attention.
Question is, is it likely the controller has died, or what? I know it's hard to be specific, but what i'm looking for is some "if it's the controller then it'll do this or that, hard drive, this or that;"
years ago i did some pc teching before i went into wireless commms so i'm not exactly a noob but it has been a long time since i troubleshot boards.
What i'm suspecting is: power supply, ( 12 volt rail is 1.8 but it's run like that for like a year) then more likely, hard drive, then controller;
but the not recognizing even the cdrom on the cable, and not on ide 1 or 2, changed cables, etc, still same thing... ouch. I'm thinking perhaps controller, but why if it was the controller would the windows crash with the massively fragmented volume, massive bad files on chkdsk....
it's been so long since i had to think about this sort of thing i'd really like to hear what you guys suspect as most likely, and why. Thanks a lot in advance.
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so i defragged. the volume, which had been well maintained, had MASSIVE fragmentation, that the defrag, never touched. odd.. so i did a checkdisk on restart, and never saw windows again. It would detect massive quantities of errors, then fail at the ''welcome owner'' screen when windows started. at the welcome screen it would show me the lsass...error bad value in registry message, and restart. chkdsk would come again, and again vast quantity of errors, attempt (claim to repair) then the lsass error at welcome.
Eventually, it would give me a bsod with "boot volume unmountable windows shut down to protect your machine.
Now additionally, it eventually started giving me "no system disk detected insert disk into A: and hit enter.
A winxp upgrade disk i have said no windows detected before it got so bad it wouldn't recognize anything on the ide at all, in bios.
I'm stumped. Seems like a hdd but why as things got worse, no detection of disks on either ide 1 or 2?
later i grabbed an old questionable hdd i had lying around and stuck it on. At first it would detect the disk as a volume in bios. Eventually, it wouldn't.
Suggestions for determining whether it's the controller or the hard drive? I'm on another machine in my home so the emergency isn't critical, but still very troublesome, as its wife's machine she likes to use a lot etc...
Thanks ahead of time. I'm a wireless comms technician who hasn't worked on pcs since like.... 1991 so i'd like to hear what you guys think.
And your 12v rail is 11.8?
I would suspect the PSU (in the first place), maybe after long and faitfull service it has degenrated, capacitors going bad.
Measure the 12v, 5v and 3.3 voltage.
Or just get a new PSU, then I would recommend the Tagan-480W.
You might try with the good old CMOS reset first.
What PSU are you having now, and is it old ?
Hopefully you guys are right and it's just the power supply. Thank you all for the feedback
I'm going to guess the controller myself, because the system should be showing other signs of instability if it were the PSU.
i had the top off. I looked inside as i cranked it. Chipset fan didn't start spinning.
Duh. I guess it had bumped it to remove the lid, look around inside. But today when i started it, - no go. The fan didn't start at all about 4 out of 6 or 7 times i started the machine.
Sounds like rma time.
Does chipset overheat sound like something that would be the likely cause of ide failure to you guys?