Hard drive, motherboard or simultaneous failure?

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?

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

try removing the jumper
or setting for cable select

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/knoppi...0-01-31-EN.iso

Paul

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/

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.

On 4/25/2010 6:58 AM, Paul 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?

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.

I've tried it a half a dozen times with each device, each scenario with
consistent results. It's really odd.

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

That's true.

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/knoppi...0-01-31-EN.iso

If the drive is plugged into either channel, the machine will not boot,
even from a CD. Even if they're on the same channel as master and slave.

On 4/25/2010 8:44 AM, Joel wrote:
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?

- Something wrong with the motherboard? I think so, and if it happens the
way you describe then I 90-95% sure momboard is the one.

- But what about hard drive? nothing about hard drive, the system just
report what the momboard tells it to report.

And if I have to solve the problem then I would.

1. Check the Power Supply to make sure it's in working order. And could
start with the basic thing like blowing the dirt off PS

2. Blowing the dirt off CPU (heat-sink) or just make sure the system is free
of dirt.

3. I don't think the cables have anything to do with the problem, but I
would check the cables to make sure they are connected. I just remove then
put them back... or just change to different slot.

I've tried a different "known working" power supply, and different
cables. Same deal all the way round.

4. If it's still not work then I may check the memory etc..

I've reseated and tried with only one of the two sticks, but I don't
have any other options in my junk pile.

On 4/25/2010 12:28 PM, GlowingBlueMist wrote:
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.

Tried it: no effect.

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.

Ditto.

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/

That's a good point. I was working to get the machine booted with a cd
so I could fixmbr the turkey, but I can't as long as the hard drive is
plugged into either channel. I suppose, since I've already retrieved
the data, I'll just zero fill it and start over.

Thanks for your speculations guys. If I figure out how to fix it I'll
let you know where the rub is, but at this point I'm inclined to just
ditch the motherboard since it's obviously defective.

Grinder wrote:
On 4/25/2010 12:28 PM, GlowingBlueMist wrote:
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.

Tried it: no effect.

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.

Ditto.

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/

That's a good point. I was working to get the machine booted with a cd
so I could fixmbr the turkey, but I can't as long as the hard drive is
plugged into either channel. I suppose, since I've already retrieved
the data, I'll just zero fill it and start over.

Thanks for your speculations guys. If I figure out how to fix it I'll
let you know where the rub is, but at this point I'm inclined to just
ditch the motherboard since it's obviously defective.




or maybe you have a spare IDE controller sitting around somewhere

Grinder wrote:
On 4/25/2010 6:58 AM, Paul 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?

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.

I've tried it a half a dozen times with each device, each scenario with
consistent results. It's really odd.

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

That's true.

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/knoppi...0-01-31-EN.iso

If the drive is plugged into either channel, the machine will not boot,
even from a CD. Even if they're on the same channel as master and slave.


The first match I could find, it was bad IDE cables.

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/sat-...-vp524491.html

One other post mentioned motherboard grounding as his issue, without
giving any details as to the before and after conditions of his
"grounding".

That family of boards had issues with a "Save" bug in the BIOS,
but that would have nothing to do with your current problem.
With the "Save" bug, the board dies just after you do a
"Save and Exit" in the BIOS. It appears to be a BIOS problem of
some sort, but I don't remember off hand whether anyone figured it
out. My theory at the time, was that perhaps the boards weren't storing
settings in the CMOS RAM, and were storing them in the BIOS flash
instead, and the bug was related to writing to the BIOS flash chip.
Some Southbridges in the past, had temperature issues with CMOS RAM,
such that the CMOS RAM was not reliable and could not be counted on
to store contents over time. (Thus, the idea that if a Southbridge came
out with an errata against the CMOS RAM, they could always store the settings
in the flash instead. The BIOS flash chip already updates itself for DMI and
ESCD, so that isn't such a strange thing to do.) I think my A7N8X-E Deluxe
didn't have the bug, whereas other Asus designs from the same family, did.
And those designs aren't radically different from one another.

That board also had time keeping problems, which apparently show up
when you overclock (select a non-canonical clock for the FSB).
Disabling APIC seemed to fix it for some people. The symptoms there,
were the software maintained clock would drift all over the place,
with way more variation than is reasonable for quartz timed circuits.

The only problems I had with mine, was picky about RAM, and the
second set of RAM (CAS2) worked fine.

Paul