Ok, here is my situation. Last weekend, I put together a new system for my cousin(specs provided below). After getting everything together and firing up the system, everything worked fine, and we thought it was good to go. I put WinXP Pro on the system with SP2 and all updates and whatnot, and ran the XP disk-checking tool and all hdd's(3 of them) came up with no errors. So I'm thinking that everything's ok with the system and I shut it down for the night.
Now, when I woke up the next morning, the system would not boot. It would POST, but when it tried to load XP, it would give a random error message. One time, it would say something along the lines of "disk read/write error", and other times, it would say something like "please insert bootable media disc" or something to that affect. And then other times, it would boot like normal, straight into XP and everything with no problems. Once we lucked up and got it back into XP, I had my cousin back up all his data just to be safe. Then, we ran the error checking test again, and defragged the drive and everything and still got no errors or anything. After that, we restarted the system several times just to make sure that everything was ok with it, and it was. The system booted properly every time, whether it was from a simple restart from inside XP, or from turning the system off and then back on again. So I'm thinking that whatever the problem was, its fixed.......WRONG!
My cousin took the system home and fired it up and BLAM, there's the error messeages again. And then again, after about the 3rd or 4th restart, he said the system booted up fine. But later that night, he said the system was having the booting problems again. I figured it might be a loose connection or a bad cable or something of that nature, so I had him double and triple check all the connections, and everything was ok there. At this point, I'm thinking that maybe it's a bad drive(or a drive about to go bad), so I had him swap drives and re-install XP on another drive, and once again, everythign appeared fine for a while.
But the next day, the same errors started showing up again with the new drive and fresh XP install. Now, all week he has been experiencing these random boot errors(sometimes it'll boot, sometimes it won't), and I can't think of anything that might cause all of this short of either a boot virus(which McAfee couldn't find any), or a BIOS problem. And just today, he told me that another one of his hdd's just flat out disappeared from XP. The drive still shows up in the BIOS, and sometimes in XP. But then, for whatever reason, the drive just vanishes from XP. Now I think it could possibly be BIOS issue, because I have the exact same motherboard(Asus P4P800-E Deluxe) that is in his system, only I have BIOS 1004, and his came with BIOS 1006(which was a beta when I flashed my BIOS with the 1004 update about 2 weeks or so ago).
My questions to you guys are, 1. Have you seen/had any issues similar to this, and 2. if so, how do you go about fixing them?
The system specs are as follows:
Asus P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard
P4 3.0E ghz processor
2x512mb Mushkin DDR PC3200 RAM
Leadtek Nvidia Geforce 6200 video card w/ 128mb DDR RAM
Hard Drives:
Original: 30 gig 7200rpm hdd(I don't remember the brand name, but the drive worked perfectly, as it was the boot drive in his old system before we did the upgrades.)
New: 120gig Western Digital drive, fresh off the Fedex truck fron Newegg. This drive formatted well and didn't appear to have any problems.
There was also a 40gig hdd in his system that was just used for storage. It came straight out of my own system, so I know it worked well as well.
I apologize for the long post, but I wanted to be as detailed as possible about the problems we're having. Thanks in advance for any help that you can give us.
Now, when I woke up the next morning, the system would not boot. It would POST, but when it tried to load XP, it would give a random error message. One time, it would say something along the lines of "disk read/write error", and other times, it would say something like "please insert bootable media disc" or something to that affect. And then other times, it would boot like normal, straight into XP and everything with no problems. Once we lucked up and got it back into XP, I had my cousin back up all his data just to be safe. Then, we ran the error checking test again, and defragged the drive and everything and still got no errors or anything. After that, we restarted the system several times just to make sure that everything was ok with it, and it was. The system booted properly every time, whether it was from a simple restart from inside XP, or from turning the system off and then back on again. So I'm thinking that whatever the problem was, its fixed.......WRONG!
My cousin took the system home and fired it up and BLAM, there's the error messeages again. And then again, after about the 3rd or 4th restart, he said the system booted up fine. But later that night, he said the system was having the booting problems again. I figured it might be a loose connection or a bad cable or something of that nature, so I had him double and triple check all the connections, and everything was ok there. At this point, I'm thinking that maybe it's a bad drive(or a drive about to go bad), so I had him swap drives and re-install XP on another drive, and once again, everythign appeared fine for a while.
But the next day, the same errors started showing up again with the new drive and fresh XP install. Now, all week he has been experiencing these random boot errors(sometimes it'll boot, sometimes it won't), and I can't think of anything that might cause all of this short of either a boot virus(which McAfee couldn't find any), or a BIOS problem. And just today, he told me that another one of his hdd's just flat out disappeared from XP. The drive still shows up in the BIOS, and sometimes in XP. But then, for whatever reason, the drive just vanishes from XP. Now I think it could possibly be BIOS issue, because I have the exact same motherboard(Asus P4P800-E Deluxe) that is in his system, only I have BIOS 1004, and his came with BIOS 1006(which was a beta when I flashed my BIOS with the 1004 update about 2 weeks or so ago).
My questions to you guys are, 1. Have you seen/had any issues similar to this, and 2. if so, how do you go about fixing them?
The system specs are as follows:
Asus P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard
P4 3.0E ghz processor
2x512mb Mushkin DDR PC3200 RAM
Leadtek Nvidia Geforce 6200 video card w/ 128mb DDR RAM
Hard Drives:
Original: 30 gig 7200rpm hdd(I don't remember the brand name, but the drive worked perfectly, as it was the boot drive in his old system before we did the upgrades.)
New: 120gig Western Digital drive, fresh off the Fedex truck fron Newegg. This drive formatted well and didn't appear to have any problems.
There was also a 40gig hdd in his system that was just used for storage. It came straight out of my own system, so I know it worked well as well.
I apologize for the long post, but I wanted to be as detailed as possible about the problems we're having. Thanks in advance for any help that you can give us.