Gimme a suggestion, please.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dick Sidbury
  • Start date Start date
D

Dick Sidbury

I have a system that I was having compatibility problems with
(XP Pro, DX9, ATI8500DV, etc). Anyhow, I swapped my mobo with the one
in my machine at the office (and the office machine works fine) and last
night mine was working fine too. This morning I turned it off and now
when I turn it back on the post doens't find either of my disk drives,
but it does find both my dvd drive and my dvd burner, one a slave on the
primary controller and the other a master on the secondary controller.
Then it tries to find disks on the onboard raid controller. And it
hangs. I cannot access the bios to make any changes.

The mobo is an MSI with a via 333 chipset. I'm at a loss as to how to
proceed other than to take each of the disks out of the system and test
each of them in another system. Can anyone suggest another solution?

thanks

dick
 
swapped the mainboard and used your hard drives from the first system?
I would clear the cmos, and also make sure the jumpers are correct,
try and NOT use CS.
 
On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 18:37:49 -0400, Dick Sidbury

XP Licensing does not like you to make too many hardware changes. You
might loading the XP install CD and doing a repair install. Also make
sure all your hardware works with XP. You might have just
inadvertently connected the cables wrong or have a loose cable before
anything just jiggle and tighten all the cards and the cables and test
it again.

I am not a big fan of just swapping a bunch of parts back and forth.
This could be anything from a setting in the BIOS to a faulty wire or
port. By swapping motheroboards you could just get 2 systems to self
destruct.

I dislike the Via chipset. If any motherboard has a Via chipset I run
the other way. I do not care much for MSI either. Most likely it is
the motherboard or some setting or a cable. It is seldom a problem
with a harddrive on a new system. An underpowered or cheap power
supply can also cause problems.

On a new motherboard of course you need the Chipset drivers installed
right after you install the OS, and before any other hardware.
 
JAD said:
swapped the mainboard and used your hard drives from the first system?
I would clear the cmos, and also make sure the jumpers are correct,
try and NOT use CS.
Click to expand...
The disk drives worked for a day and a half with this motherboard, and I
haven't changed the jumpers, etc. And how can I clear the CMOS?

dick
 
Last said:
On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 18:37:49 -0400, Dick Sidbury

XP Licensing does not like you to make too many hardware changes.
Click to expand...
Yes I've had to telephone MS to activate the new install.
You
might loading the XP install CD and doing a repair install.
Click to expand...
The system hangs right after the post so it will not even attempt to
boot so I can't use the XP cd.
Also make
sure all your hardware works with XP. You might have just
inadvertently connected the cables wrong or have a loose cable before
anything just jiggle and tighten all the cards and the cables and test
it again.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I've tried again with the network card removed and the sound
card removed and the raid CARD removed so that I basically had just the
video, hard disks, and optical disks.
I am not a big fan of just swapping a bunch of parts back and forth.
This could be anything from a setting in the BIOS to a faulty wire or
port. By swapping motheroboards you could just get 2 systems to self
destruct.

I dislike the Via chipset. If any motherboard has a Via chipset I run
the other way. I do not care much for MSI either. Most likely it is
the motherboard or some setting or a cable. It is seldom a problem
with a harddrive on a new system. An underpowered or cheap power
supply can also cause problems.
Click to expand...

It's all in a Supermicro godzilla sized server case, so I assume that
the power supply is adequate.
On a new motherboard of course you need the Chipset drivers installed
right after you install the OS, and before any other hardware.
Click to expand...
I did that yesterday when the system would boot.

dick
 
Any time you swap the motherboard, it's best to do a "Repair" install of XP
*immediately*!

You didn't indicate if the replacement was *identical*, and even if it was,
there can still be slight differences, such as chipset changes (and thus
require different drivers), even the BIOS could be different, esp.
concerning SATA drives. If the motherboards are substantially different,
there could be vastly different components, you could be introducing SATA,
different USB options (1.1 vs 2.0), Firewire, even the IDE controllers could
change. That's why you need to do a repair installation of XP, which will
force XP to reexamine the hardware and make adjustments.

It's possible (although unproveable) that your motherboard swap was with a
VERY closely matched board, but perhaps just different enough to have caused
some mismatch between XP and the BIOS. This might explain why it worked
initially, but a subsequent boot fails.

The best thing to do at this point is, as someone suggested, reset the BIOS.
Locate the little coin-type battery on the motherboard and pop it out for a
couple minutes (to let the mobo fully discharge), unplug the power cable
too, then replace both. This will set the BIOS back to defaults. If it
still doesn't work, pop the battery and unplug the power supply OVERNIGHT,
then try again.

If things still are no working, try installing one HD at a time, and keep
the optical drives OFF the same IDE channel as the HDs (not a good idea
anyway, most opticals are ATA33 or ATA66 and slow down modern ATA100/133 HDs
considerably, it's best to place the HDs on IDE #1 (master/slave) and
opticals on IDE #2 (master/slave)).

HTH

Jim
 
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