Background info
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I have a Shuttle AK32E MB that has been very reliable since I bought
it a few years ago.
Recently, meaning a few months, I my brother gave me his 'broken
computer' knowing that I like them for parts. It turned out that it
wasn't broken. Somehow, he has kids, the sata drives boot drivers got
corrupted. I called him and told him in case he wanted it back. But he
had already bought a new one and told me to keep it. Since it happened
to be much better than my AK32E I figured I'd use it instead and use
my old one as a nice backup, just in case.
At a recent family reunion 2 other family members gave me their old
computers. One supposedly broken, the other no longer needed. The
supposedly broken one simply had the master switch, on the back near
where the power cord plugs in, turned off. My uncle had taken it to a
computer shop and they told him the MB was fried and sold him a new
computer. I told him not to rely on just their diagnosis since it was
the first time he had gone to that shop. But my Aunt, his wife, is
having a bout with cancer and I'm sure that lead to his impatience
with it. So he bought a new one and I now have 4 nice computers, or so
I thought.
Since the 2 new computers I got from the reunion had some nice
components in them I figured I could make my backup AK32E computer
even better. Maybe use it to do most of my cd/dvd burning/editing
whenever that bug gets to me. I hate staring at the screen waiting for
long processes to finish and moving all that to my backup was a great
idea, imho.
I moved my main dvd burner to my backup(AK32E) computer then booted up
into windows xp pro sp2 to install Nero. I got almost to the end of
installation when the computer suddenly powered down. Not a good sign.
I rebooted and everything seemed fine. But I removed Nero and tried
reinstalling. Exact same thing at about the same spot. So I figured it
may be my copy of Nero.
But about this time I noticed that my Main drive was set as a slave
drive with no master. Not sure if it had been that way since I
reinstalled or not but I tohugh that that might be my problem. So I
pulled the drive and it's jumper was set for cable select. I changed
it to master and tried to boot up. No go. I ened up formatting and
reinstalling windows xp. It was now set as the mast drive but now it
would not recognize my main dvd burner and being installed in the
system. It's a plextor and I love the thing so I got sorried thinking
after all these years it had finally crapped out on me. So I put it in
my new system my brother had given me, which is where it was before I
put it in my backup, and everything was fine.
I was starting to lose patience so I decided, screw it, I'll use the
computer my uncle gave me as my backup since it also has a brand new
dvd burner and a dvd-ram drive in it already. But even though
everythign seemed ok with it, there was a problem. I wont get into
that in this post. I plan on asking for all of your expertise with
that once we figureo ut whats wrong with my shuttle AK32E system
first.
when I dicovered there was a problem with my Uncle's gift i decided to
knuckle down and fix my old reliable Shuttle system.
Now to the problem:
Problem
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I turned it on and got the apology about an improper shut down and I
chose normal startup. It showed the bar on the bottom(progress
indicator) and it moved all the way to the far right, then stopped.
After a few minutes I powered it down and retried. Same thing. So I
thought maybe the hard drive was having trouble. I removed the hard
drive from my another working computer, put it in, and got the exact
same thing. That showed me it was not the hard drive. Also, no posting
error beeps what so ever. I rebooted and went into the bios, loaded
the defaults and only changed it to recognize a usb keyboard and got
the same thing. The ram was being calculated, but I thought maybe,
just maybe... so I took one stick out at a time and and each was still
calculated ok, but got the same thing.
Also, if I remove the jumper from the hard drive and detach the only
other drive, cd-rom, it acts like there is no hard disk at all and
gives me the failure to boot message, about the drive missing.
Oh, and I even tried clearing the CMOS in case it somehow got
corrupted. But that didn't change anything what so ever either.
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Ok, thats about it. I'm sorry for being so long winded on the
description. But I figured if you knew everything I had tried up until
now you'd be better informed on what I might have over looked. And I'm
hoping like crazy that I'm overlooking something. Because if not it's
beginning to look to me as if the Primary IDE channel is shot.
Can anyone think of something that might be causing the problem? I'll
try just about anything. I'm familiar enough with computers to know
that if I overlook 1 little tiny thing it can cause a problem. So
hopefully that's what I'm doing.
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