Help! Motherboard problem, HDD problem or both?

[Alex]

Hello lovely people of Hexus! I'm hoping one of you may be able to help me.

As of yesterday evening my computer is playing silly buggers. Just for background, it's a Core2Duo, Asus P5K-VM motherboard, and a standard 300GB Maxtor SATA HDD. No recent changes to any hardware or software, and AVG antivirus is up to date and running a daily sweep - no recent problems.

Yesterday when starting up it showed the ASUS screen (the one you get just after you turn the computer on, not sure what it's called), beeped twice then announced "HDD error", press F1 to continue. If you press F1 it says wait, then nothing happens for at least half an hour.

At first I thought it must be the HDD, but then I unplugged the SATA HDD, plugged in an old IDE one I had lying around and it worked as far as "windows did not load properly last time, use safe mode?" prompt - and then trying either safe mode or normal mode shows about 10 lines of startup data then instantly resets the computer.

I thought I'd take it to a computer shop to have a look, but if it definitely sounds like it might be the motherboard then I'll probably just buy a new one for £50 rather than spend the money on a review from a computer shop and have to buy the motherboard anyway!

Any thoughts?

Alex

[CWH]

Hi,

It depends on the beeps! Are these two short beeps, one long one short, and if so what combination?
These codes are usually very helpful, so knowing the beeps helps narrow it down. One immediate check is that 2 short beeps can mean it's relating to a USB device, so if there is a USB drive attached, the PC might be trying to boot from that, instead of the internal.
As I say though, let us know the actual beeps first.

Colin

[nimbu]

The old ide HD you plugged in was that install of windows for your current setup? You cant just take a old windows install for another machine and boot it up on another.

If the data on the old IDE is not needed, reformat and reinstall windows on it clean, though to me sounds like a red herring. I would be more inclined to think that your SATA disk is on it way out.

Do you have another machine you can test it with? Get a copy of the maxtor /seagate hd test tools. I think you can download it as a bootable ISO. Burn that to disk and then boot with ur SATA in, sure it will take 30 mins to boot but then with the tool you can check the disk.