[NTLUG:Discuss] Homemade machine locking up at swap

[gin]

I had originally set the jumpers to master on both the hard drive and CDROM 
since they where on the primary and secondary controllers, respectively. 
The weird thing with the hard drive was the time it took the BIOS to 
autodetect - 15 to 20 seconds (I read something in one of the HOWTO's night 
before last about large drives giving the BIOS a hard time when trying to 
determine the cylinder count). However, if I set the jumper on the HD to 
the default, the BIOS got it in a snap, and there was a noticeable 
performance gain (but the locking still occurred).

I suspect that it is probably just a bad motherboard. My boss wanted to sit 
in when I built this machine, and he did touch, or came very close to 
touching, the motherboard or components several times without any static 
guard or first touching the chassis, despite my warnings. I don't know. All 
I know is that the machines I assembled so far alone have worked (as best I 
can tell) fine (even according to my crude accident of a benchmark - 
compiling MySQL). Perhaps this case was just a result of too many cooks in 
the kitchen. At this point though, it is hard enough for me to assemble a 
machine by myself - trying to make sure I do every step carefully and 
correctly, much less try to juggle explaining to someone else how things 
work. Heck, for all I know, maybe I zapped something in the process.


At 10:17 PM 2/8/00 -0600, you wrote:
>gin wrote:
>
> > I swapped out the motherboard, and everything worked fine. But I also
> > changed something else I that I thought might not have been a good idea: I
> > had laid out the power cable to the motherboard under the drive. I was
> > wondering if the power cable might have interfered with the IDE ribbon? I
> > really don't know if the magnetic field from the power cable is significant
> > enough to cause problems, but I decided to not take chances.
>
>Well, it *shouldn't* be enough to cause problems - and if it is, then that
>would imply that *something* is extremely borderline.
>
>One thing I could think of would be if the drive cable is not being
>correctly terminated on the drive.  I wonder if your drive has a
>jumper not correctly set or something?
>
>If that is the cause then almost anything could change the behaviour -
>a different case, a longer cable, different temperature, alternative
>(but supposedly identical) motherboard - wrong phase of the moon -
>anything!
>
> > I pulled it over to the other side of the chassis, well away from
> > the drive and ribbon when I installed the new motherboard.
>
>Well, if that *does* fix it - then don't stop looking for problems.
>It's likely that you'll end up with a system which is still somewhat
>flakey - and on the next full moon...kablooie!
>
>--
>Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
>sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
>sjbaker at hti.com      (work)
>
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