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Tom_ZeCat
04-26-2010, 12:10 AM
I have a PC that a friend home built for me in 2006 while I watched. It’s from some salvaged components from an HP PC that I bought in ’04, including an Athlon 64 3700 single core processor. That HP’s motherboard crashed when its heat sync came loose.

Per my friend’s advice, I bought an Antec case, a Gigabyte motherboard, and a 500 watt power supply, and he rebuilt my PC, salvaging the HP’s processor, memory, the Sony DVD drive (which had replaced the HP OEM one), and the floppy drive (ha ha ha). The computer served me well until about a week ago.

I went to boot up and I got a message to the effect of NT something file from the OS could not load. For me that should have been no big deal since I meticulously keep an Acronis ghost image of my hard drive. However, when I booted to my Acronis emergency boot CD, the Acronis emergency software loaded, but neither my keyboard not mouse would work and I therefore could not do any kind of OS restore via Acronis.

I then tried booting to an Ubuntu Linux CD. Ubuntu came up, but, like before, I could not get the keyboard or mouse to work (both of which are USB based). I tried an older PC/2 based mouse and keyboard, but had the same problem.

I noticed that my USB keyboard had bare wires exposed and wondered if maybe they had fried the motherboard-based USB ports. With a different keyboard I tried booting, using different USB ports. The result was as follows. Neither the keyboard nor the mouse would work in the native motherboard USB ports booting either to Acronis or to Ubuntu. When booting to Acronis with the keyboard and mouse plugged into USB ports in the Belkin PCI USB card, I had the same result. Neither the keyboard nor the mouse would work.

However, I had a different result when booting to the Ubuntu CD with the keyboard and mouse in the Belkin USB ports. When doing so, Ubuntu loaded and asked what language I wanted, giving me 30 seconds to do so. While that time was ticking down, the keyboard and mouse would not work. However, after those 30 seconds ticked down, Ubuntu automatically chose English and then the keyboard and mouse both worked!

It seemed that the computer still worked, but its native USB ports were fried. It looked like I could still use the PC if I made it an Ubuntu Linux one.

I left it idle while setting up a different Windows PC, which was a higher priority. When I went back to it to install Ubuntu, I had a different result. I could not get anything to load. The PC goes through the normal BIOS steps and then gives me this message:

NVIDIA RAID IDE ROM BIOS 4.84
Copyright (C) 2004 NVIDIA Corp.
Detecting Array

And it hangs on that and never does anything else. Is my motherboard shot? I’m reasonably sure the USB keyboard with exposed wires shorted out at least the motherboard’s USB ports. Maybe at that point the motherboard itself was about to go. I’m considering doing another salvage operation by just taking this case, power supply (a 530 watt one that recently replaced the 500), and DVD drive, and building a new PC.

Does this PC’s behavior sound like one whose motherboard has gone bad? Another relevant fact: The power supply was replaced about three weeks ago when the power in my apartment went out for a few hours and came back on. That ruined the power supply. However, when I replaced it, the PC ran fine after that.

Deneb
12-05-2010, 12:59 PM
http://forums.mysuperpc.com/showthread.php?3584-First-boot-troubleshooting-info