Hi all.
First post, and sadly, I am not happy about it.

First, here's the scoop.

I'll start with the original crash. The computer restarted itself,
came back up and said "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND
PRESS ENTER". I restarted it again, went into the BIOS, and all
of the settings were screwed up. It reset itself itself to boot from
CD-ROM. It disabled all of the onboard RAID.

So here's what I have done thus far:

1) Pulled the memory to get the "computer ticked off" beep
for no memory. I've read that this is a good way to see if the mobo
is functioning. Oh, and the computer beeped.

2) Disconnected all of the hard drives, and tried to get to the
windows install screen off the CD-ROM where it says no drives
detected. Couldn't get it to read off the CD-ROM though.

When I power on my PC, it performs the memory test just fine (even
though I do find it strange that it does the "memory
count-up" every time... I don't recall it doing that in the
past), then it just dies at the PCI device listing screen "DISK
BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER".

Now, I've recently had a mobo fail on me... and the thing wouldn't
even start. So I'm getting different symptoms here, and I really hope
it isn't the mobo this time.

HERE'S THE QUESTIONS (yay!)

1) Is there any reason that a cpu or memory failure would result in a
system not detecting any drives?

2) I did notice that the southbridge chip was very very hot. Is this
where onboard RAID stuff is done? Is doing onboard RAID typically a
killer for a motherboard?

And here's the system specs:
mobo: eVGA nForce 680i SLI
video: eVGA geForce 7900 GT-KO (x2) (running multimonitors, not SLI)
memory: OCZ PC2 5400 1G (x2 - Dual channel, or some such jargon)
cpu: intel PentiumD 3.0 GHz 800 FSB
hard drives: Western Digital 10000 RPM (x2) in RAID 0 (boot drive)
more HDs: Western Digital 10000 RPM (x2) in RAID 0 (data)
even more HDs: Seagate 7200 RPM (x2) in RAID 1 (backups and lesser
used data)
And the CD-RoM drive, which works, and I don't know what it is.

Did all these arrays smoke my motherboard?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

In alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt no (AT) spam (DOT) invalid (mobius2702) wrote:

I don't know about the restart; but there I'd suspect from your
description that the CMOS battery went dead. Time to get a new one.

Second, similar problems happen when you have bad IDE cables.
Yes, they go bad too.

I'd try replacing both and resetting the CMOS first.

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On May 17, 7:16 am, n... (AT) spam (DOT) invalid (mobius2702) wrote:
It sounds as if your IDE bridge is not working, If your BIOS can not
detect a harddisk or CD ROM

mobius2702 wrote: