I didn't touch it i swear! I've Killed my desktop?!

[MurphmanL]

Hmm, very odd indeed.
Basically, my desktops been playing up somewhat recently, with spontaneous reboots as ive mentioned in previous posts, ive replaced the power supply and blah de blah to try and solve the problem, without much avail.

Anyway tonight i came up with a fresh idea i hadnt tried, maybe removing one of the sticks of ram and seeing if juggling them around or eliminating a possibly dodgy stick / ram slot could solve the problem.
However it would seem by removing the stick of ram ive somehow killed off all my ide devices upon next reboot.

How on earth can this happen? Ive now tried swapping ide cables around, all configurations, swapping molexs, booting with just the hdd powered , yet the motherboard doesnt detect any IDE devices detected and so halts.

Im thinking the only possible fault is maybe the motherboard IDE connectors are all bust? which might explain if they were dying why id get a sudden , short and sharp reboot if there was a slight intermission of data from ide devices including the hdd from the rest of the board.

Does anyone have any ideas? Im guessing il have to salvage the parts and pick up a cheapo motherboard and start again, of all the rotten luck!

[mike_w]

Well, first of all, you could try reseting the BIOS. Then, try taking out everything that isn't required for basic boot up (i.e. take out any disks, drives, PCI cards, and so forth), and see if that improves the situation - if, somehow, it does, then you could try plugging a CD-ROM drive in and seeing if you can boot up Memtest and Prime95. Can you hear the hard drives spin up when you boot up?

In all probability though, if you've tried swapping IDE cables, and both channels aren't working, and nor are any drives, it does sound as though your motherboard has keeled over.

[MurphmanL]

the hdd does indeed spin up, hdd activity light flashes on the front, but i think you're right, the mobo is pretty much had it, its a good few years old now, and no matter which devices i swap or whatever or assign to what ide channel it doesnt detect a thing!

Which then means this motherboard is useless im guessing
I guess ill just have to salvage the parts :/

[Jay]

sounds like a short on the board to me