Can I call this a failed motherboard now?

[Painless]

My question: is it worth the time and effort to carry on investigating. The cost of a new mobo or possibly even a completely new machine is probably less or at best similar to your cost.

The only reason I would do this amount of diagnosing / troubleshooting is if I had time on my hands and wanted to practice my diagnostic skills.

[PCX]

Originally Posted by crashtech

I guess the only thing left to do is yank it out of the case and test it on the bench, since the next step is to change it anyway. Once in a while the way it is mounted, or a foreign object caught under the board can cause a problem, although it's very unlikely.

Is funny you mention that. We actually had a customer come in with a custom built that they did themselves and the motherboard was shorting out. Come to find out they put different size standoffs in the case and in the wrong places. Needless to say, the board was warped and fried as a result . . . I can't imagine how it lasted for a month . . . .?

[Tepin]

I hate diagnosing failed motherboards without any failed tests or visible damage. I would still try a different HDD and SATA cable/s. I've worked on systems with similar behavior and had disks that passed diagnostics when they are offline, but just fail to perform in real world environments.

The downside about electrical problems as that almost any component can cause the same symptoms.

I agree that it looks like a failed board though. One overlooked symptom to the failed component is heat. Open up the case and touch things inside. Things with heatsinks on them are the most obvious things to start at. If you react to touching the Southbridge heatsink the same way you do to a soldering iron that's not normal.

[BigFrog_Computing]

Bad hard drive is my reaction to the OP. If Windows can't read it, and Linux can't read it, that's a pretty good sign.

What happens if you boot a Linux live CD without the HDD connected? Can you use USB, surf the web, etc, all normally?

[crashtech]

From the OP:

Tested HDD outside of computer using Seatools

I've not used Seatools in a long time, but a bad HD presumably would have exhibited some problems during this phase.

[Cambridge PC Support]

Originally Posted by painless

my question: Is it worth the time and effort to carry on investigating. The cost of a new mobo or possibly even a completely new machine is probably less or at best similar to your cost.

The only reason i would do this amount of diagnosing / troubleshooting is if i had time on my hands and wanted to practice my diagnostic skills.

+1



(.........................)

[Painless]

Thank you Kev.

John

[crashtech]

There is merit to the thought that it might be wasted time to go further, but I can also understand just wanting to know for the sheer satisfaction of having definitively solved the problem.

After a second look at the OP, I wonder if the temporary installation of a disk controller card might shed some light on things. I've had many instances of onboard IDE controllers failing, though I have not seen this as much with newer SATA setups.