Re: HDD drive light on permanently and IDE drives not seen

On Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:11:32 -0700, martin.cantell rearranged some
electrons to say:

Using Win XP Home SP2.

Everything has been running fine for a few yeart. Doing nothing special
(just selecting the start menu), the PC locked up
totally with the HDD light on permanently. I waited for an hour before
deciding that it was totally locked. Ctrl/Alt/Del would not work either.
The
HDD did not sound as if it was accessing, so I performed a hard turn off
with the power button.

I now have the following. The HDD light comes on immediately power is
applied and stays on permanently. The BIOS now cannot see either the DVD
ROM
drive or my spare IDE HDD. The main drive is a SATA which is seen ok.
Not
sure if this went at the same time, but certainly not a long time
before.

It takes a lot longer to get through the splash screen at the start of
the
boot (ASUS SLI16N Premium BIOS motherboard splash screen) and takes
longer
to boot into XP, but it does get there. I can use XP as normal, but
things are a fair bit
slower than usual.

I have tried the following:
Checked device manager for items listed as failing - none (but DVD drive
not
listed)
Disconnected the IDE cable from the DVD and IDE HDD - no change to HDD
light.
Replaced IDE cable with a spare - no change to light or devices Tried
the second IDE port (have both devices on one IDE cable) - no change
to light or devices.

I cannot get my DVD or IDE HDD back and the HDD light stays on all the
time.

I have yet to try resetting the BIOS and cloning the SATA drive and try
with
the cloned drive, but thought I would try here first.

Thanks for any help you can provide. I have looked on Google, but have
not
managed to find a suitable answer yet.

Cheers

Martin

I have had similar problems with an ASUS motherboard. I have RMAd a
particular motherboard twice (it's on the way back now). The first time
it was NTF. The board would power up maybe once every 25 hits of the
power button. Chilling the board in my freezer, and then connecting it
while it was cold allowed it to power on (until it warmed up, and then
the problem returned).

Disassemble your computer so you have nothing but the PSU, motherboard &
video card, outside of the case on a piece of cardboard, and try it then.
If it then works, then you have something shorting your motherboard
inside the case.
.