Question about a broken motherboard

[latrosicarius]

Hey guys, I got a problem I thought maybe I could post it here and see what you think is the problem.

My brother was playing on the computer and I guess there was too much load on the circuit with the TV and space heater and all and the circuit breaker blew a fuze.

When he turned it on it went through the bootup sequence until it said "press F4 for some kind of options" (I don't know exactly what it said b/c I wasn't there). Well there was nothing else to do, so he pushed F4. Nothing happened.

On subsequent reboots, we now only get a totally black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left like in Jurasic Park when they had to reboot the computer systems. The only keys that do anything are CTRL+ALT+DEL.

I was thinking it was the power supply, but we changed it with another one and it still has the same effect. The thought also crossed my mind that the hard drives might have been damaged, b/c they are striped (RAID-0) and I'm thinking that F4 screen might have been the RAID Controler options.

Do you think it is the motherboard or hard drive? Or possibly something else like the CPU or RAM? I appreciate your analysis of my situation. Thank you!

[Max Tractor]

What type of comp, self build, pre built, list specs pls

[latrosicarius]

Thank you so much for replying. It's a self-built. Here are the stats:

Mobo: Intel D875PBZ (last board with socket 478 / AGPx8 before they moved to the PCIe boards)
CPU: Intel P4 3.4Ghz w/ HT (Non-EE-edition... this was one of the last chips before Intel started using a numbered naming scheme)
Vid Card: ATI X850 Pro 256MB
RAM: 2 x 512MB DIMMs of Kingston HyperX DDR 533MHz (PC4300)
HDDs: 2 x 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax10 SATA w/ NCQ in RAID-0 (Stripe)
Sound Card: Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS

If I'm leaving anythig out please let me know. Thanks a lot!

[Max Tractor]

Ok, have you tried clearing cmos?

[latrosicarius]

What do you mean "clearing" the CMOS?

There's no text prompting "press DEL to enter BIOS" or anything... just a Jurassic Park-style blank screen. HOWEVER, he was able to get into the BIOS just by pressing DEL. From there, we made sure that the boot order was correct (first = CD drive, second = hard drive array).

Still there is no text at bootup, and it just goes to the blank screen. When the Windows XP CD is inserted, there IS some text that says "press any key to boot from CD...". When a key is pressed, it enters the Windows Setup screen like it should.

Going as far as possible into the setup wizard without formatting or losing any data, we got to the "choose which partition to install Windows on". This screen listed my hard drives as an array, which is a good sign, indicating that the computer at least recognizes them.

When booting up and trying to enter the RAID configuration utility by pressing all the F keys repeatedly (b/c I'm not sure which one it is), there was no effect... i.e.: still the blank screen.

So at this point, I have no idea what is the problem. I'd guess it was either the mobo or the hard drives, but I'm not sure. What do you think, and what can I do about it? Reformatting is an option b/c I have a backup slave drive. Thanks in advance!

[jamin]

I have had something similar when the mbr on my raid disks corrupted due to an excessive overclock!

Try using the windows setup cd to boot into the recovery console. Try the commands fixboot and fixmbr. (Fixmbr will overwrite the mbr so if you are a linux user you will need to reinstal lilo!)

Then reboot the PC.

[Max Tractor]

What do you mean "clearing" the CMOS?

It will clear all bios settings, check the motherboard manual, it will involve truning power off/pul plug from wall, remove the battery on the board, and move the jumper to clear cmos pins position

[dannyboy83]

Originally Posted by latrosicarius
What do you mean "clearing" the CMOS?

usually you can do this by changing a jumper and then powering up the PC, or by removing the CMOS battery on the mobo, so that it loses its charge.

[Koolpc]

Yea, try removing the battery for a min. You may have to change some jumpers but should be easy to find. Put the battery back and see what happens. Go into the bios and put everything on default.

[latrosicarius]

Wow thanks for all the replys guys. I will definitly try taking the battery out when I get there if the problem is still not fixed.

Right now, however, I'm talking my brother through the WinXP revocery console. We could not access the C: drive by typing DIR. It just said something like "Directory is invalid or innaccessable" or something. So we did FIXBOOT. After that, DIR listed all the alocation units and stuff, but we still weren't able to access the directory.

We did CHKDSK and it said there was no problems. We then did CHKDISK /P and it said there was an invalid or unknown disk or something like that. We started to do FIXMBR, but it said it could potentially delete all data on the disk if somethig went wrong.

Do you think I should continue with FIXMBR? BTW, if you want to know exactly what the problems were, I'll do it again and write them down. Thanks!

[jamin]

No probs, thats what this forum is all about m8ey!

As your drive is inaccessible I would say run the FIXMBR. I have used it successfully on many occasions, and it hasn't deleted anything on the disk! (A corrupt MBR will render the disk inaccessible) However, on looking at your problem again it may be an issue with your raid array, if the power failed while the drives were writing or the drive heads bounced, who knows what damage could be done Hard to say without seeing the puter!

I think you need to get into your raid bios, have you tried reseting you nios CMOS as described above? The unfortunate prob with Raid 0 is if the array borks, then you are hosed! Unless you can find a decent recovery program to rebuild it! Ideas anyone?

Too much info cant hurt m8, try and put down everything!

[latrosicarius]

Hey guys I'm back. Thanks for your patence so far I reset the CMOS like you guys said by unplugging it and leaving the battery out for about 10 minutes. When I put it back it, it appeared to help because now instead of that blank screen, it actually showed the Intel picture that's supposed to come up. I went into the BIOS and "resent all default settings", then checked to make sure the boot sequence was (1) floppy, (2) CD, (3) HDD, and saved & exited.

Upon bootup it says "NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart." I knew by reading this link on how to use the XP recovery console how to copy the NTLDR file from the CD. So that's what I did, booted up into the XP CD and did the whole "copy d:\i386\ntldr" thing, and it said "1 file overwritten".

However, it still says "NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart." When I press F4 to try to see my RAID setup, it keeps repeating the following line: "NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart. Reboot and select proper boot device.

The only thing to do left was FIXMBR. So we did it and it said it was sucessful. However, DIR did not list the drive contents and instead had a bunch of symbols and "BOOTEX.log", and more symbols, and "NTDETECT.com", more symbols, and "NTLDR". It's set up in a chart. CHKDSK /P still reports "one or more unrecoverable errors". When booting up, it still says "NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart."

Does anyone have any more ideas of what the problem/solution might be? Thanks so much.

[Agent]

If you have cleared the CMOS, you'll need to set up your RAID drives again in the BIOS

[latrosicarius]

I thought the RAID controller was different from the BIOS... like it normally would say "press DEL to enter BIOS setup", then "Press F4 to enter RAID setup".

Anyway, if I have to setup my RAID array again, won't I lose all data on the disks?

Thanks

[latrosicarius]

Okay, I went into the BIOS and there was an option to "Enable Intel RAID" so I did that.

However, I can't get into my RAID setup no matter what I do. F4 does not get into it. It only does exactly the same as before, which is it keeps repeating the following line: "NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart. Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device."

When I don't press F4, it only says "NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart."

After I did the FIXMBR, it would not go into the Recovery Console b/c it said "no drives were detected". So I added the F6 drivers to a floppy and selected them durring Windows Setup. Once that was done, it would recognize the drives, but CHKDSK and DIR returned the same as before (chkdsk /p said "there are 1 or more unrecoverable errors", and dir said a bunch of weird characters).

I've done everything I can think of. The problem is, if I can't enter F4 to setup my RAID array, how can I even reformat?

[latrosicarius]

I don't want this to happen again so I just bought a SATA Raptor 74 GB at Newegg to use as the master, and I'll use my exiting two 300GB SATA drives in a RAID-0 array as a slave for files.

I only have two SATA ports on my motherboard though, so I bought this RAID controller PCI card for the slaves. Do you think there's any chance that I can install Windows on the master (Raptor), and plug the slaves into the PCI card, and somehow still get my data off of them? Thanks