[arnoldsoccer4]

This has been an intermittent problem for quite a while now. My computer is custom built and I have a very odd problem. Today I came back from an out of town trip and went to boot up and got overclocking failed,press f1 to enter setup. I knew from experience before that this meant my boot hard drive wasn't being detected. So I booted up went into bios and saw only 1 of my 3 hd's was detected. I pulled out the cmos battery and switched around some cables and got a boot. Currently however I can only see 2 of my hard drives. I believe I have had 2 out of 4 sata ports die while out of town. Also for a long time now I have had intermittent boots. My computer will actually boot 1 out of 6 times, every other time it just sits there with no motherboard beeps and doesn't output a video signal. What is going on? Dying motherboard?

 

[olblueyez]

Is it overclocked? If so then put the proper stock settings in the bios and start there. Other wise I would be thinking about a new power supply. Also, if the computer is a few years old then try a new bios battery. Take the old one with you so you can match it up. Tell us more about the motherboard and power supply.

 

[Arainach]

Agreed. Overclocking can screw up any number of things; first set everything to stock and see if it goes away.

 

[FrederikS|TPU]

Check if all SATA ports are turned on and configured in the proper manner. It is most likely just that some of the SATA ports are turned off by default or set to the wrong mode.

 

[LordZ]

If you haven't OC'd, I'd say go ahead and get a new motherboard. I'm guessing that if you had OC'd, you would have already returned the clock speeds to normal but, just in case, I second returning the clock speeds to normal.

Also, I have to say I'm curious to know what motherboard you actually have.

 

[olblueyez]

Whatever you do? Dont try a 3 dollar CMOS battery before you go buying new power supplies and motherboards.

 

[Zodduska]

after checking that they are all enabled, with the machine off rotate the drives on the sata ports then check the bios to determine if it's the ports or the drives themselves that are causing your problem.

 

[arnoldsoccer4]

I post a topic then abandon it, sorry about that guys. I was running an ecs 945p-a ver 1.1. I took my computer to a friend's house to determine whether it was a power supply or motherboard problem. Did some quick tests, replaced the motherboard battery, and we replaced the motherboard. I was not overclocking (it's summer) and I've had problems since I bought it, random shutdowns, restarts, and most recently the post issue. All my sata ports were enabled, and they were indeed to blame. I am now running an Asus p5gc and couldn't be happier, other than the fact that the screws on my golden orb 2 heatsink are stripped. Anyone know where to get replacements?

 

[arnoldsoccer4]

The biggest pain and issue with it all was that I was not able to change any bios settings. If I hit save and exit the computer would go to reboot, not post, and not save any settings.

 

[ziplock]

ECS - AKA "The FUSE"

I hate to say it, but those motherboards are not known for their quality or reliability. I've replaced dozens of them in the past. They're ticking time bombs. Often the capacitors end up popping which in turn can cause many of the symptoms you've described.

Anyway, glad to see you got a quality motherboard and are back up and running.

Enjoy your PC.

~Z

 

[LordZ]

I used to trust Asus but I consider them over priced and often poorly designed. Though, they at least are far more reliable than no-names like ECS and Foxconn. These days I consider Gigabyte to be about on par with Asus but a lot cheaper. Though, you have to be picky about which board you get because some of their boards are poorly designed too.

If you had mentioned in your first post you had an ECS board, I would have immediately just told you to buy a new motherboard, for many of the same reasons as ziplock explained.

As for getting replacement screws, you could either try to match them at a hardware shop or try to get them from the manufacturer. I'd hit up the manufacturer of the heatsink first. Usually, you get spare screws but I guess not.