Rob Oplawar
July 12th, 2009, 12:14 PM
I have an EVGA NVIDIA 680i type thing (I'll go dig through my boxes later to find the exact model). Last night I shut down from Windows. This morning I turned it on, and my BIOS ran a memtest, which I figured was fine. It proceeded to tell me that it couldn't find a mouse and prompted F1 to continue, which I did, at which point it told me it couldn't find the primary boot device.
Strange, I think, perhaps it's related to the memtest. So I power cycle and it tries to run the memtest, and I skip it and proceed to the BIOS setup. Lo and behold, it can't detect a single one of my 4 HDDs. All the cables are hooked up; the motherboard is fully connected with good solid connections.
I figure there are four possible causes for this.
1: All four of my hard drives have simultaneously failed (along with my mouse?). Hah, right, sure.
2: The firmware on the motherboard has somehow been corrupted causing it to fail to see the connected hardware (except the keyboard, which oddly enough is connected via the same USB cable as the mouse...).
3: My motherboard has failed, perhaps a short from a piece of loose metal?
4: My PSU has failed and can't provide enough power to drive the HDDs. It's a 750 W, so if it's working correctly it should have no trouble powering all my hardware.
The only change I've made to my configuration recently is to add and install a Wacom Tablet, but I've rebooted my computer several times since then without any trouble.
Thoughts? How do I figure out what's the culprit so I can fix/replace it?
e: I had some similar problems a few weeks ago- my motherboard couldn't detect my primary boot device. I played around with it for a while, and eventually unplugged some USB devices at which point the problem seemed to go away. It would appear that the problem never really went away after all.
This is actually more or less temporarily crippling to me. I have no danger of data loss, but I don't have any backup computers lying around that I can easily plug the hard drives into to continue my work. My last remote backup was last Monday, and I refuse to repeat a week of work when the data's still there but inaccessible.
Not to mention I can't really afford to buy a new motherboard right now. Sigh, I guess I don't have much of a choice. Perhaps I'll order one from Newegg and then just take the week off.
ee: Well I just tested everything I could think of, including swapping out all the cables I could. It looks like it's the motherboard.
God dammit, the motherboard is by definition the hardest part to replace. *grumbles*
I wonder if it can be repaired, like reloading the firmware or something.
Strange, I think, perhaps it's related to the memtest. So I power cycle and it tries to run the memtest, and I skip it and proceed to the BIOS setup. Lo and behold, it can't detect a single one of my 4 HDDs. All the cables are hooked up; the motherboard is fully connected with good solid connections.
I figure there are four possible causes for this.
1: All four of my hard drives have simultaneously failed (along with my mouse?). Hah, right, sure.
2: The firmware on the motherboard has somehow been corrupted causing it to fail to see the connected hardware (except the keyboard, which oddly enough is connected via the same USB cable as the mouse...).
3: My motherboard has failed, perhaps a short from a piece of loose metal?
4: My PSU has failed and can't provide enough power to drive the HDDs. It's a 750 W, so if it's working correctly it should have no trouble powering all my hardware.
The only change I've made to my configuration recently is to add and install a Wacom Tablet, but I've rebooted my computer several times since then without any trouble.
Thoughts? How do I figure out what's the culprit so I can fix/replace it?
e: I had some similar problems a few weeks ago- my motherboard couldn't detect my primary boot device. I played around with it for a while, and eventually unplugged some USB devices at which point the problem seemed to go away. It would appear that the problem never really went away after all.
This is actually more or less temporarily crippling to me. I have no danger of data loss, but I don't have any backup computers lying around that I can easily plug the hard drives into to continue my work. My last remote backup was last Monday, and I refuse to repeat a week of work when the data's still there but inaccessible.
Not to mention I can't really afford to buy a new motherboard right now. Sigh, I guess I don't have much of a choice. Perhaps I'll order one from Newegg and then just take the week off.
ee: Well I just tested everything I could think of, including swapping out all the cables I could. It looks like it's the motherboard.
God dammit, the motherboard is by definition the hardest part to replace. *grumbles*
I wonder if it can be repaired, like reloading the firmware or something.