[alabram]

Good Morning,
nobody laugh please - I have an old workhorse, that after 10 years of faithful service has a problem. The poor thing is barely worth recovering but ....it's personal.
The problem is this:
The hard drive and the cd-rom are not recognized

There are NO beeps on Post/and the HD light is red, and then goes out.

When I go into set up, the primary master (HD) and slave (cd-rom) are not installed. The secondary master, the CD-RW and the floppy are recognized. I have video, keyboard & mouse too. I tried to boot from ms dos 6.22, which worked but I still couldn't find the hard drive. I also switched the power supply to the hd and cd-rom. The fan is running; but it doesn't seem as if the hd is spinning. I can enter setup and that's about it.

I switched the cables out, but that made no difference. I ordered new hard drive from Ebay, which is on it's way, but still I'm wondering if it's either an electrical problem, or a motherboard problem

motherboard : intel VS440FX ATX motherboard with AMI bios v. 1.00.11. CSI
Hard drive: IBM Deskstar 3

For sentimental reasons, I'd like to go to extraordinary measures to help this elderly machine.

thanks all

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Welcome to Geeks to Go!

Let's start with the basics. Try replacing the battery in the mobo.

A typical motherboard battery:

[admin]

Welcome to Geeks to Go!

Let's start with the basics. Try replacing the battery in the mobo.

A typical motherboard battery:

[alabram]

thank you,
I did replace the battery even though I was getting the correct time and date...

[admin]

I suspect it's probably your hard drive, but it's unusual that you'd get no beeps or error messages. Let us know if the new one from eBay works. If not, probably a bad motherboard.

[alabram]

thank you. I should get the new hd soon; the lack of beeps are confusing. the AMI website stated that No Beeps means a short or 'loose card' ; but the original manual doesn't address No Beeps . Anyway....it's sad...

[admin]

Is there a NIC (Network Interface Card) installed in this system? If so, try removing it.

[alabram]

too funny - I was just doing that! The machine could use a good cleaning too - I haven't done so in several years

[Samm]

Hi there

I noticed you said you had the hard drive and a CDROM drive on the primary channel. Have you tried getting the bios to recognise the hard drive with the CDROM disconnected? (Make sure the jumpers on the deskstar are configured to 'master active' pins 1-2).

With the CDROM connected as a slave, the deskstar should be jumpered on pins 7-8 instead.

[alabram]

And thank you again.

The h/d jumper was already set to 1(primary) , but for a lark I tried to 3 (cable select) and 2 (secondary) just for kicks with the cds disconnected. and changed about the positions on the motherboard

fooling around with the jumper positions; I got both the cd-rom and cd rw running just fine but then the floppy fails. Also with both cds running & the floppy failing, the video failed briefly! go figure.


anyway I'll invite you to the memorial service once I find out what died.

[alabram]

Little update:

If you get cutesy and google 'deathstar' you can get more info. on the IBM Desk Star - apparently one model (75 Gb) was very unreliable and this site posts *.wav files , known as the click of death. Now I can just barely hear that.

http://www.dataclini...-disk-drive.htm

there is a firmware update for the models affected.
http://www-307.ibm.c...ocid=MIGR-44195

this won't solve my problem as mine was not one these, but the sound is pretty much the same; in IBM's defense my model has got to be at least 10 years old. And kudos to my friend Tony of Custom Computer Center in Ayer, Mass who built this grand old machine so long ago.

Cheers

[Samm]

Thanks for the info and good luck