Re: CMOS bad?

• From: Ghostrider <-00-@xxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 12:09:28 -0700

"Clark" <who@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I don't know, any chance the SCSI adapters are bad. Could you run an IDE hard drive on that board to check?

I don't think so. Unless you have reason to think otherwise, pulling
an old SCSI adapter and replacing it with a new one of a different
type would usually be considered a good test of the adapter.

I have experienced a cascade of problems that seem unrelated, but
perhaps not:

1. For no obvious reason, I could no longer mount my IDE cdrom drive
   or my SCSI cdrom drive. Could only think of some shared module not
   loading, but wasn't able to identity it (Oh - I'm running Linux
   Debian Sarge).

2. In working on this, I rebooted and found I couldn't boot because
   instead of the boot loader running after the SCSI adapter scanned
   for its devices, I got garbage. At first it was busy (moved and
   changed a lot), but now it is stable: about five garbage
   characters, which repeat and followed by a blinking cursor. The
   boot halts at that point. Same results with three different
   bootable hard disks. However, no problem booting from a boot
   floppy.

3. Suspecting my SCSI adapter, I put my SCSI drives on another
   adapter. Because it happened to be a U360, my BIOS (about three
   years old) couldn't cope, so had to upgrade the BIOS. This allowed
   me to swap the SCSI adapters, but that didn't solve the problem.

4. Then I began to have video problems. Windows would become somewhat
pixellated, and my browser would not be able to handle graphical
changes and hang, and one time it hung the keyboard and mouse as
well.

5. Finally, I began to notice some brief garbage after the motherboard
   banner displays at the start of the boot and before the SCSI
   adapter begins its scan of its busses.

I concluded that ROM BIOS was having trouble loading data, but no idea
why. I came discussions of failing filter capacitors (either
electrolytic or tantalum) on motherboards or in power supplies, with
the resulting high frequency hash causing a variety of mysterious
problems, even crashes.

A quick glance at my MB did not show any obvious signs of swelling,
or oozing, but I really need to remove the MB and look at things
through a magnifying glass. Don't know if I can pop open my (Enermax)
power supply like I used to do with old power supplies. I can try
swapping out the power supply, and replacing a MB capacitor is not
out of the question, but if I can't find anything, I may have to
replace the motherboard.

I.e., update my machine such as follows:

Asus A8N-E motherboard
Asus video card EN660/TD/256
RAM: OCZ 2Gb DDR SDRAM dual channel
CPU: AMD Athlong 64 3900+

This has SATA support, but I assume I can just ignore SATA. The video
card is PCI-e x 16, which I gather is preferable to my current AGP. I
used to spring for California Power & Cooling power supplies, but
finally decided I was spending a lot of money and settled on
Enermax. Any one have suggestions for very reliable and reasonably
quiet 450W+ power supplies?

My aim is a machine that is reliable, is compatible with Linux,
yet nimble, but no overclocking or super speed. Technology should be
up to date, but not bleeding edge. I believe the component list above
does that.

The first thing I might have done would have been to replace
the CMOS battery. The loss of the IDE cdrom drive (in lieu of
an IDE HD) indicates that the bios configuration setup has been
lost. Without a bios setup, no SCSI device will boot since it
is an option that must be set up in bios configuration even
though identification of the SCSI host adapter might appear in
POST or the booting sequence.
.

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: CMOS bad?
    • From: Haines Brown

• References:
  • CMOS bad?
    • From: Haines Brown
  • Re: CMOS bad?
    • From: Clark
  • Re: CMOS bad?
    • From: Haines Brown

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