Over the years, I have had several hardware related
failures. Those failures do not always show up as what one might
think. These failures and the fixes for those failures are
documented below
Problem with OS booting, sometimes the system
would boot up normal, other times the system would respond with "NO
OPERATING SYSTEM FOUND" or it would lock at POST. FIX: New
Motherboard. The IDE and SCSI controllers where failing, along
with the RAM could not be seen.
System was shutting down for no reason, would
usually occur during times of copying files from one hard drive to
another. FIX: Power Supply was burnt up, and I mean burnt up.
Upon startup, could only boot to SAFE MODE.
Also when trying to reinstall OS got the error "Could not install
VGA.SYS". FIX: Initially I thought it was a problem with the
on-board video card, I installed a PCI video card and could boot to
windows. But a short time later, the same problem occurred
again. REAL FIX: Bad Stick of RAM. I had to pull out all
of the sticks, reinstalled one at a time, then tried booting.
After going through the 2 sticks (Dell Optiplex GX-100 only has 2
slots), I found the bad RAM stick and replaced it with another one I
had on hand.
Hard drive getting errors on it. FIX: got a
copy of Spinrite and did a fix on the
drive.
Sony USB CDRW: would not detect CD Rom in drive.
FIX: RMA of the drive back to manufacturer.
Large Files over 10mb in size would corrupt for
no reason. Scandisk showed no errors on the drive, Spinrite
also showed no errors on the drive. FIX: Bad Stick of RAM,
Replaced the RAM with a good one.
A CD ROM exploded in the
CD ROM drive. FIX: Replaced the drive with another one.
When trying to verify some hot swap hard drives I
got the following: Unexpected scsi command failure
scsi cdb sent 03 00 00 00 0e 00
host adapter status 113h
target status 02h - check condition
sense key 0Bh
+sense code 47h
+sense code qualifier - 00h
This turned out to be a parity error. On my
Adaptec AIC-7895 host configuration, I had to DISABLE parity.
At least then, I could Low Level format and verify the drive in the
SCSI BIOS, but could not use the drives due to a problem with the
SCA board. More to come on this!
