WARNING: perplexing problem

[[JiF]bigjohnson]

Okay, I decided to download free trial WoW (3.16GB) which took me sunday night, and most of monday. then came the patches (another 700MB) so finally get to play a little... and its pretty cool; remenicent of the ol'days of diablo2, ultima, AD&D, etc. so when I finally make it to like 6th level night elf hunter and see it's almost 12:30am.. so log off and check emails when.... CRASH! system reboots and says Disk Read Error, hit ctrl/shift/delete... second problem no power to usb keyboard or any usb devices. So I'm think what da poop? so I tried tuesday night pulling out everything but the keyboard and got the keyboard to recognize but same disk message... so change my boot priority and throw in the xp disk thinking it's hard drive in nature... xp studies computer hardware and goes dead. So I study the post screen and oddly, the IRQ assignments for a bunch of stuff, mainly serial bus, and SATA items say "NA". but the bios sees the drive, so I go ahead and reset defaults in CMOS by jumper and battery remove. no affect. so I adjust bios to manual reserve IRQs trying to force the serial bus to run on a good IRQ but 3 and 4 seem to shuckerow'd the system. checked the power supply... but that seems ok. Any thoughts?
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, AMD Athlon64 3200+ venice 2.0GHz s939, 2 GB DDR400 G.SKILL, ASUS EN6800GT/256GDDR3/PCI-E16/SLI, ASUS 16x DL DVDRW, 200GB Maxtor SATA 300GB/s, Rosewill 420W ATX PS, zBoard.

Okay I figure it's the board which I bought open box 2 years ago. This is what I did because my wife ties up the other main computer with her online college classes, and the kids the rest of the time (mine is off limits).. I ordered an A8N32-SLI Deluxe, Rhino 24pin-PCIe16 500W PS, AMD Athlon64 4000+ Clawhammer 2.4GHz s939, and 2 GB DDR400 G.SKILL for like $275. I think the hard drive is ok... I think it's the board.

[[JiF]corn]

I had a problem similar to yours and ended up getting a new hard drive.
I checked Bios and it did detect it, but would not start up.

AMD Athlon(tm) XP 3200+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.2GHz
2048MB RAM corsair
Hard Drive: 160 GB Maxtor
mfg.date. jan.2004


http://www.jiff.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1094

P.S. It took me and extra day to fix it with new drive because i forgot to set the jumper.

[[JiF]LtWaterboy]

BigJ,

Glad to see ya back!!

I just had a similar problem with my new system - had to replace the two hard drives that were in Raid 0 setup.
Mine crashed (froze) in middle of BF42. Went to reboot, and gave me no boot drive failure/error - is this what you saw?

After three hours with Dell technician, he sent me two new ones. After reformatting and installing everything, stll had problems.
These were caused by all the recent MS windows update (my computer would freeze at the Windows XP screen - the little scanning light like Knight Rider would stop).
After going to a system restore point, prior to all the windows updates, it worked fine again and I had to cautiously reinstall all the updates (and now it works fine).

The initial drives problem I did the same stuff you did (changed the jumpers - didnt work, redid my boot set up - didnt work, etc.).

are you able to get into chkdsk at all and do a chkdsk /p?
can you get into the repairs utilities with the disk in? ie hit F8 r F12 to access?
able to startup in safemode or way to get to a pc/system restore point?

reason why I ask this cause it looks like my orginal drives may have actually been salvageable, just didnt the installation disk time to truely work.
think you may have a bad boot sector or partition.

I did a HD diagnostics - sometimes it would pass, sometimes it would give me a failure. Wouldnt boot even though I got them to pass.
Thus, it COULD still be your HD, just a sector/formatting issue (which of course would mean you still loose everything except the hardware itself!).

[[JiF]bigjohnson]

I took the drive out and it still says IRQ "NA" for serial bus, Serial ATA, and 1394. My new board just came today and I will install tomorrow... hopefully it's not the drive because it would take me days to load everything back on it. but I will be running an A8N32-SLI deluxe with a AMD64 4000+ claw hammer, and 4 GB DDR400

[[JiF]LtWaterboy]

BigJ,

let us know what you find out. I'm curious to keep learning when stuff like this occurs!!

LT

ps. evrything I read about this stuff was pointing to conflicts with shared IRQ's. sounds like you changed in BIOS from AUTO to MANUAL to reassign.
I guess changing back to AUTO didnt help?

[[JiF]bigjohnson]

Well here's the good news... I'm running an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe now (google the specs) with a new 500W ATX+ ps and Athlon64 claw hammer 2.4 overclocked and 4 GB DDR400; everything installed good.. need more grease cause processor is HOT. Bad news... it must have been the drive because I still get the same problems.. so I'm going to drop another $100 on a drive and have to reinstall everything which sux because I have to try and see if I got my trend micro info somewhere... ok and have to actually buy the WoW disks.

[[JiF]bigjohnson]

I guess windows XP only sees 3GB of RAM? weird but running SATAII 320GB HHD now! and staples had a clearance deal on a 320GB exterior HHD USB for $47 and gots one of thems

[[JiF]lini]

I guess windows XP only sees 3GB of RAM? weird (...)

Don't worry - that's pretty normal, unless you'd use the 64 bit version. If you use a 32 bit operating system, you won't see your full 4 GByte of RAM - because with 32 bit you only have a maximum address range of 4 GByte, but a certain part of that is needed for other purposes, e.g. blending in the address ranges of PCI devices et cetera.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini