[NTLUG:Discuss] Homemade machine locking up at swap

[Steve Baker]

gin wrote:
> 
> 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).

My 18GiB hard drive here at home - and my machine with two 36GiB drives at
work - both seem to autodetect pretty much immediately.

The fact that you are finding drive jumper weirdnesses - together with
this thought that moving the power cable inside the case makes a difference
very much makes me suspect some kind of cable termination problem.

> 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. 

Static damage can certainly be pretty insidious.  A chip can fail days or
even weeks after it gets zapped.  With non-technical people, I always get
very melodramatic with the wrist bands and antistatic mats - just so they
get the message.  (Although I confess that when slapping together PC's at
home, I do employ the 'touch the chassis' approach).

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com      (work)