Managed to dodge a major 'puter crash

[Heavens Eagle]

Came home at lunch today for an errand. Fired up the computer (tried to anyway) to check my e-mails.

It wouldn't even get through the post tests. Wouldn't even get to the point of turning on the monitor.

(sigh) Thought about it all afternoon. Ordered a replacement motherboard as the post codes were showing some kind of problem with the southbridge.

Came home and opened the case turned off the power and vacuumed out the case. It wasn't really all that bad. Some white powdery kind of dust on the horizontal surfaces and that was all. Cleaned up quite well. Pulled the vid card and my TV tuner card. Did some more inspection and replugged the vid card.

This motherboard has 2 bios memories. It has run on the blue one since I built it. For some reason it would get part way through the loading and turn on the green one as well.

I finally flipped the switch to the green (green light/blue light) bios and it loaded to the bios. Reset the bios for the raid 0 and finally got it to boot to windows after about 2 hours work. (YAY!) :yipee

I backed up all my important files (there weren't many) to my external drive and made sure I wasn't forgetting something important. I figure this motherboard is on it's last leg after only 2 1/2 years. It has had some odd problems here and there all along, so while it was a surprise, it wasn't really surprising. We will see how it does over the weekend. I think there is a marginal component that isn't doing well when it boots. The new board should be here next Tuesday and will be an upgrade from this one. All I could get was a rebuilt board. Hopefully it will do what it should and will last the course. All the other components should swap no problem, same brand same base chipsets, just a few extra bells and whistles.

Curious if this will reboot once I shut it down now. I guess we will see when the time comes. Not worried now as all the needed stuff and photos have been moved to the external drive. Sidestepped the bullet on that.

So why am I posting this? Just to remind everyone to do some kind of backups on your data. Would have hated to have lost all the work and photos that were done recently. Got lucky, learned some stuff about the newer computer hardware, and got a big reminder to archive my stuff more often.

 

[sharkman]

Close call!

Glad you didn't loose anything Paul!

 

[ausf]

I guess I should pay attention to that prompt that says it's been 800 days since my last backup.

And I have no excuse because they're automatic if I just plugged in the SSD.

 

[Heavens Eagle]

Thanks guys! I got lucky but had enough perseverence that I was able to get it up and running for at least one more time.

As a rule of thumb I keep most of my archival software and stuff on the external drive. The important items I wanted to get were one large cardex file with passwords, info, and misc stuff. While I had some backups none were as recent as I would have wanted. The other stuff was the files and photos for my ongoing builds. Stuff on back burner was already on the external drive, only things I an actively researching or working on were in that desktop file. Got that all backed up.

Have a new motherboard coming and might or might not redo the system when I install the new board. We will wait and see. A co-worker was saying that he has a lot of trouble with power supplies going bad and causing boot problems due to the weird power in Cordova TN. Thing is I have had odd problems with this machine for a while, one being some high temps on one sensor (upper 40C versus upper 30C which the rest of the system runs at) (Cpu never breaks the low 40s and the vid card at heavy gaming only hits upper 40s)

Anyway when new Motherboard gets here and it all gets set up again I will add some other stuff for archiving purposes. The biggest problem was running 2 drives in a RAID 0 config that while it is much faster, also means that it can have all data lost if one or both drives crap out.

 

[moon puppy]

You really should get more than 2.5 years out of a system board unless you're overclocking the thing. I just retired an HP prodesk machine that was on the manufacturing floor, supervisors computer so it was in use all 3 shifts, 10 years old to the month. It was in what I call, a hostile environment. Sucking in all sorts of nasty air and other multiple users logging in. I had not touched it since I put it in place other than to help move it when they moved the office.

Bad power, get a power conditioner, not a UPS, conditioner. (Wash rinse and repeat of course )

:geek

 

[Heavens Eagle]

The power thing was my coworker's thing. I really don't think it is that. On boot up it has a digital readout for the post codes. At first it would lock up and hang at 04 which was initialization of southbridge. It now will pause at 68 then at 79 though sometimes it will just go to the 79. Also southbridge stuff according to the book. Then it will hang at A2 which is peripheral initialization (USB, SATA) Then it either sets there for a while or it will show the Bios screen then will load the OS and seems to run fine.

I don't think it is power supply. Didn't go with a cheap one to begin with and it just seems to come up and run. As I built it component wise to handle overclocking and don't, the temps all stay below 40C except for one motherboard sensor that always seems high. The CPU always runs fairly cool. Built it to last but I think I have a bad board. Should find out this next week for sure. There have always been some flaky things that have happened for no apparent reason. Wasn't anything I did I know but no real way to tell.

As to longevity, my old XP machine is 15 years old. It has had some upgrades and parts changed out but has just plugged along. Need to get it up and reloaded for backup and legacy hardware. Still a decent machine, and still like XP better than the new garbage that Microshaft is cramming out these days.

 

[moon puppy]

What brand motherboard?

 

[Heavens Eagle]

MSI X99A Gaming 7

Getting an MSI X99A Gaming 9 to replace it.

 

[moon puppy]

I remember MSI brand, I avoided them. Good luck Paul. ASUS was the brand that served me well back when I built them.

 

[Heavens Eagle]

My old motherboard was a SOYO and it was quite good. Tried to do research on reliability on boards when I built this and it seemed that they were all about the same. All the major brands had good boards and reviews and all had negative. It seems to always be a crap shoot. For the moment I can get this beast to boot up it just takes some patience and a couple of resets. Once it is up it seems to plug along just fine. Would have considered another brand but was trying for compatibility on drivers and such. If the next one dumps I will get an ASUS or Gigabyte and deal with a OS reload.

 

[moon puppy]

I'm sure you've looked into this but have you burned the latest firmware on the bios? Maybe it's a known issue.