PCA Forums

I have a box I have been using as a file and print server. It is a socket 939 with an MSI-Neo 4 Nforce 4 board, two IDE optical drives, two sata drives and an ancient radeon video card.

It won't boot windows in any mode and all efforts to fix file corruption issues using native windows tools have not helped. BartPE on a cd-rom will boot.
Sometimes BartPE sees both SATA drives sometimes it does not. System sometimes hangs when posting at the "detecting IDE drives" point. It will only finish booting if you turn off the power supply before attempting to restart.

I have done all the usual stuff I can think off - swapping SATA cables, swapping in a known good power supply, reseating all cards and memory as well as trying different IDE and SATA connectors on the board.

I just did a clean windows install on a spare SATA drive I had lying around and will tinker with that for a while to see if the system behaves.

It seems that I either have a bad drive or my board is going south. Socket 939 boards are getting hard to come by, so I want to know what else I can do to correctly diagnose whether I have a bad drive or a bad mainboard.

Thanks

Try installing windows to a different to a hard drive that you know should be good. If you get a bunch of errors while tring to install, it's probably the board.

I would also take everything off the board and clean it with CRC if you haven't done so already. As a last resort you could try clearing and flashing the bios. If you want to keep the 939, I'm sure you could find one cheap if you look around.

Here's a refurbished Asus HP A8N-LA for ~$60.

However, if you plan on keeping this board for a while, I'd lean more toward a Tyan (~$90). TYAN- TOMCAT K8E S940

You could also take your chances on e-bay but I'd bet someone on PCA may also have one.

Well if a hard drive in intermittently failing to initialize it's the drive (unless both drives do it), the controller, or a bad drive cable.

If it's the controller then you essentially have a bad mobo since it's not very practical to install an add-on controller anymore.