Dead Motherboard?

[Peja]

I'm pretty sure I know what the answer to this is but thought I would check with everyone here for a second pair of eyes to see if I have gone over everything. 


The other day I was playing some Donkey Kong, having the best round of my life....probably would have set world records when my system blue screened.  Try to restart, nothing.  I just get the error, disk boot failure after the bios info loads. 

Initial thought was a hard drive issue but I think I have since ruled that out. 

Here is what I have done:

- Tried to find hard disk within bios....does not show up. 
- Inspected for bulging caps, has solid caps so can't tell.
- Cleared CMOS.
- Disconnected all peripherals and even went as far as moving from vid card to onboard video...same error with both modes of video.
- Change from IDE to AHCI...same error.  Then back to IDE....same error.
- Tried putting only one stick of memory in and when that didn't work, used the other stick to rule out bad memory. 
- Replace hard drive with 2 different known working hard drives...same error and they don't appear in bios either. 
- Tried to flash bios with latest version but can't boot from freedos disk or usb with bios bin on it because it pops up with the same disk boot failure. 

I pretty much tried everything I can think of to troubleshoot short of trying a new PSU but can't imagine that is it.  Seems like it is something with the mobo not detecting any IDE/SATA devices.  It will recognize USB however as that is how the dvd drive and usb for the flash is connected. 

Is this board dead?  Or at least that portion of the board?  There was no electrical surge and the unit is on a power strip. 

Current hardware is:

mobo: Asus M3N72-D (can't find replacement on ebay)
Proc: AMD Phenom 9750 Quad Core (had it laying around free when first building mame)
Vid Card: XFX 8600GTS
Mem: G-Skil DDR2-1066 PC2-8500 (2x2gb)


If mobo is dead, can anyone recommend me a replacement board since the current one isn't on ebay?  Any out there that you know of that I can use existing memory, proc, vid card (or perhaps one with built in and better vid card)??

Thanks for taking the time to look at this and any info you can give me. 

Peja

[Thenasty]

try a diff IDE cntrl. Maybe your onboard one is shot.

[Peja]

try a diff IDE cntrl. Maybe your onboard one is shot.

Diff IDE cntrl such as a PCI card or something?  I forgot to include it but I tried various SATA ports including ones included in the raid group and outside of it.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Expressline99]

Did you change the boot disk order? Can you change it so the DVD with the free DOS is first?
I'm sure you can get a cheap SATA controller card that would be the cheapest route if the
SATA ports are dead.

Does it count the memory at all when you try to boot up?

[Wired203]

reset bios,  pop battery and unplug power cord from power supply.  hit power 2-3 times then re-install the battery and see if that clears up your problem.

[zaltec]

I think Thenasty meant to try a different "port", yours has 6 SATA ports, you can use any of them and set it as the boot device. I didn't read through the manual, but it likely also has 2 controller chips if it has 6 ports (often 1-4 are integrated, 5-6 are separate chip for RAID), so if it's currently on SATA1 move the cable/hdd to SATA6 to test. Also you said you tried different HDD's, but didn't say if you tried a known-working SATA cable. Or known-working power cable. is there a DVD/CDrom in this system that works?

This doesn't sound like a fully dead motherboard (otherwise it wouldn't POST at all), but likely a dead SATA cable, power cable, or less-likely-but-still-possible a dead SATA controller chip.

If the motherboard's integrated controller is fully dead, try purchasing a hardware-based PCI or PCI-E SATA controller card (likely ~$20) before you have to replace the motherboard. If you feel you must replace the motherboard for some reason, mostly any socket AM2+ motherboard will work (you don't need this exact one if it's unavailable), however you will most likely need to reinstall Windows and all your software due to different chipset drivers.

[RandyT]

Pretty sure he meant a different controller altogether.  It's possible that only one part of the integrated SATA controller failed, but it's unlikely and even if that were the case, the others probably aren't far behind.

I'd put in an add-on controller and see if that fixes it.

[lowlytech]

If you have another power supply laying around try that.  Not to common but I had a machine the other day where the hard drive would never spin up and it was from the power supply being weak and had a few swollen caps.  It was strange cause everything else seemed stable, but after changing out 3 different drives I knew it wasn't the hard drive.  Replaced the caps in the PS and the desktop is back up and going with original HDD.

[Peja]

Ok...update time:

After testing the PSU yesterday with another computer, the other computer fired up just fine. 

I tried a different dvd drive and was now able to see this under bios and I could load freedos in order to update my bios but I decided not to update just yet.  I grabbed my sata to IDE adapter (kinda looks like one of these: http://www.vesalia.de/pic/slimsata13ide40.jpg) and fired up the blue screened hard drive through IDE but got another error: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.  0xc000000e.


I had another drive laying around so then I decided to fire up acronis and clone the original blue screened drive to the new drive.  I then tried that in the system and it boot up via IDE just fine, sata still gives me the original error with new drive.  So I am thinking the sata is most definitely dead. 

The only thing I had trouble with the new drive is for some reason xpadder wanted me to go through the install process again (prompted me automatically) and then certain buttons won't work within hyperspin now.  I can navigate through wheels, hit my player 1 start button to select games within wheel, but then player 1 start button does not take me into the game.  It's been so long since I configured hyperlaunch/spin, I have no idea where to troubleshoot that issue.  Any ideas would be helpful.  (keys definitely show as working in winipac)

Why would the new drive not work correctly and also have me go through the xpadder setup if I did an exact clone of the old drive?


Also, should I try to update bios?  Could that bring sata back to life? 

I'm all up for ideas at this point.  I have the system working again, just no working buttons to get into a game but buttons do work to get into a system wheel.  Also, the old drive is still giving me same error via IDE or SATA.

Thanks guys.