Trouble on my backup system; can anyone help?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Hi, everyone.

The seeming Auddigy 2 ZS issues I reported in another thread turned out to be a symptom of a larger issue–possibly a bad motherboard–so that system’s gone back to the manufacturer. Hauled my old P4 out of storage … and now I’m having trouble with that, too. :(

The machine has two HDs: the original SCSI and a big IDE I added for file storage. They lived together happily for a long time.

But every so often, the SCSI just disappears. Like right now. It doesn’t show up on the list of SCSI devices or as a drive (via Device Manager or My Computer). The machine defaults to the IDE (where I installed XP after these problems appeared).

And then, just as suddenly, the SCSI’ll reappear–without any revealing comment from Windows.

I figured this for a loose connection, but no, everything’s in place. Then a BIOS boot-menu issue. Evidently not that, either. The system’s set to boot first from the SCSI. And Windows won’t detect the SCSI drive as new hardware.

Any one have other ideas? (Is there something else in the BIOS I might have missed, for instance?) Is this just an intermittent hardware failure?

It’s not an urgent issue–the machine otherwise works fine–but it’s a nice fast SCSI and so better for gaming than the merely fast-for-an-IDE IDE.

Thanks in advance!

Peter

2

Sounds like the drive is going bad, but I’d check your voltages in the BIOS. The power supply could be failing.

3

Appreciate the tip, Tom. Any idea what those voltages should be?

Peter

4

There should be a sticker on the power supply that lists the proper ranges. Then you can check those ranges against what the BIOS is reporting. You may also be able to look up the individual parts on the Interweb (CPU, RAM) to see what voltages they’re rated for. Some minor fluctuation is normal, but the amount of tolerance differs slightly for each piece of hardware.