The Logic Off Topic list

Litepipe wrote:

>          I'm having a problem with my IBM Deskstar 20gig drive. My computer
>won't regognize it. I've had the hard drive for about 2 years with no
>problems. Over the past couple of months every once in a while the hard
>drive wouldn't get noticed at boot-up. After a cold boot it would usually be
>o.k. The problem seems to get worse with time and today I can't get the hard
>drive to be noticed at all. I've tried a cold boot, entering the bios,
>taking the hard drive out (it's in a removable tray) and nothing is working.
>I haven't noticed any weird sounds coming from my computer, but it's in a
>closet so I don't really hear it much. I just derfagged it the other day and
>it appeared o.k. There have been a few times where SX or Logic crashed
>because it appeared te hard drive disapeared.
>         Any suggestions? I didn't just lose my drive did I? Thanks!!

Litepipe - I have bad news. I suspect the caps on your mobo are not long
for this world. I had a very similar experience a year or so ago on the
machine I am typing this on - or an earlier incarnation thereof. 

A couple of years back a lot of Taiwanese Mobo makers cut corners by buying
capacitors from a crowd in Taiwan which stole a process for making
electrolytic caps from a Japanese firm. They sold them at half the price of
the Jap firm and so the mobo manufacturers saved about 25c per board. 

Unfortunately, the Taiwanese firm left out a step in the process and the
phony caps suffered from a slow internal buildup of gas. Eventually they
fail and cause all kinds of instability in the power rails on your board. 

I had an Abit PIII board with this problem - the first manifestation was
errors in some but not all Ethernet transfers. Quite some time later it
started refusing to see my boot drive on the first boot up. It would work
on a reboot. Eventually the board (Abit BE6 II) failed. 

I later discovered this was very common and some major brands had whole
lines of machines based on boards with this fault and according to some
support whistleblowers one major firm (think of HAL) had a policy of not
revealing this to consumers unless they already knew of the problem.
Imagine having some dork tell you to reinstall windows when he knows you
have one of two million of their machines built on boards with this fault.

A new board (a by then hard to find Asus TUSLC2 - superceded components are
not easy to get) fixed everything. 

I could be mistaken about the problem in your case but I would bet your
drive is just fine.

Regards,
Murray