Brain's Magical Mystery Problem

[BrainEater]

This issue is here because I believe it is folding related.

These things started happening after I switched my main rig video cards up to the current config of Nvidia 285 (Primary monitor , pci-e 1) + Nvidia260 (secondary monitor , pci-e 2).I fold 24/7 with these 2 cards and the MPICH smp client...I also game using the secondary (260) for physX.

The machine runs factory settings , no OC.I can post exact machine specs etc if it'll help....It's the rig in my sig.


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Before I start it's important to state that my machine runs perfectly.Every application I run works.There are no errors on anything I have tried.

The first symptom :

One of my harddrives started 'clicking' after several days of folding.The psu works fine......I then saw some thing about 'Thermal issues *....

At 100% load on everything , the cpu runs at 52c , the video cards are all below 65c , the HDD's are below 30C.....There is no heat issue that I can find.

This is all moot , because I cannot reproduce it , it hasnt done it in the last 2 weeks of testing.All the HDD's appear to be fine , and the clicking has not happened again.Everything works perfectly.

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The second symptom

So I took the machine out and cleaned it with compressed n2 yesterday .

Once again , after a complete teardown/cleaning , it had issues.At this point the BIOS resets every time I reboot.I have checked every wire and connection , it all checks out.

....And once again , all apps/all drives work perfectly....but..

Symptom 3

For whatever reason , I had some 'hard reset' of IE . I got errors when coming here and a couple other places.....Thats gone away too though.

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I'm at a loss.

My rig runs fine once it goes , but there's some sort of issue.I'm not going to do a teardown/analysis til after CC , but something is weird.

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Thoughts ?

[boggtrotter59]

Bios resets could be caused by a dead or dying cmos battery...

[BrainEater]

Yep.

Thing is , I've never seen a dead one.I've got heavy use computers that are 10 years old that have perfectly fine batteries...In all my years of fixing rigs , I've never found a dead battery.

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It's moot.

After 24 hours on and folding , the problem has dissapeared....Again.The rig boots fine now.

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F.R.E.D. !

I'm going to just ignore it for now.Once the CC is over , I'll do a complete teardown and pull it out of the case and see what I can discover.

[BrainEater]

I'm in the process of the teardown troubleshooting.....

I believe I've found the issue.

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I took the rig down and cleaned it out , and then installed the new 1Tb drive I bought to backup my data.

The BIOS is still resetting every reboot.

I started a data transfer to the back up drive........Hardlock.....Upon reboot , 3 drives did not show up in BIOS even......

I removed the 1Tb drive and put it in another rig.....it's working fine.Upon restoring the original drive config , BIOS sees everything again........

So it looks like the SATA controller/southbridge is failing.

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Finally.......what an annoying problem......it's still working fine right now , but i'm doing network transfers of my data as fast as I can.

[sswilson]

Do you have a different "new" drive to try on the motherboard? Might not be a failure, might be some kind of incompatiblility with that particular drive (or possibly 1T drives).

[BrainEater]

I don't .....at this point it doesnt matter.The BIOS resets everytime I shutoff my rig.

Considering the issue started with a hard-drive-click......(with all hdds working fine) I think a southbridge issue is most likely.

It's interesting , that whole corner of the motherboard seems to have problems.....the BIOS/southy/SATA controller are all right there.....

I'm just going to replace the mobo.

[_dangtx_]

at least you nailed 'er down good!

got warranty? :)

[BrainEater]

Nah no warrantee....

I'm almost done backing up all the data , once I have I'm going to remove the whole shootin match from the case so I can play around.

If I could get the bios to stop resetting , I'd just keep it....first thing i'll try is a new battery....I've never seen a dead one , but yah never know.

[BrainEater]

Originally Posted by boggtrotter59

Bios resets could be caused by a dead or dying cmos battery...

Nice work !!

You win 1st prize.



...I did'nt want to believe it could be the battery , man "I've never seen that !" ....hahah

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Here's my current hypothesis ;

My motherboard (maximus formula) has a slide switch that enables the 'BIOS reset' pushbutton on the back...My cmos reset button has always been sticky , and the mobo slide switch is really loose.

I think I might have accidently moved the mobo BIOS switch into 'enable' , and with the bios switch on the back being sticky.....

Bottom line : the bios appears to have been shorted for quite some time......the battery even spat out the standard death spew....It was dead forsure.

New battery in , everything (so far) is working .

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I've yanked a couple drives too......testing underway.We'll see what happens but thats 1 down 1 to go....

[Eldonko]

I have a HD that has been "clicking" for over 2 years. No idea why but it works fine.