Yet another K7S5A problem...

[Kostya]

Ok, here we go...
I got the mobo, built the system about 3 and half months ago, and about a month ago, without warning, it died... I had recently installed a new CD-Burner, but that's about it. Besides a temperamental AGP slot(I had to reseat the video card every few weeks to get it to even POST), there were no other issues.

I am running a 1.333 Mhz T-Bird,
Stock Heatsink, was running at about 55 degrees,.
512 DDR Ram(Not Crucial),
a GF2 GTS Card withn 64 MB,
30GB HDD(IBM 75GPX)
Panasonic 16x CD-Burner
ECS K7S5A, with a fairly old bios, dating from about august I believe.
300 Watt PSU, AMD approved
Running a dual boot of Mandrake 8.1 and Windows 2k.

So here is the story, the computer is working fine, when suddenly it crashed, and I can no longer boot Linux nor Windows, with Linux giving me some odd error, which I can't recognize, while Windows starts telling me about disabling various Cache options. After doing just that, windows still refuses to boot, so I attempt to redo the hard drive. Now, under windows 2k, and XP installations, it will fail to install giving me the same message at various points throughout the install process. Seemingly random times. Linux however is much more dependable, it tells me there is an error mounting hda at 1:03(Or something to that effect). Since then, I have done the following testing with the machine:Replaced the hard drive(I knew about issues with the 75GPX), replaced the video card with other AGP, and PCI options, as well as tested the CD-ROm, the Hard Drive, and the video in other machines with no problems...

This leaves 3 possible culprits:
1) Power Supply: Unlikely as linux gives me the same error at the same point in time every time, and the machine still POSTs and does not appear to have PSU issues.

2) CPU: Also unlikely since the errors I was getting all seemed to be hard drive based, with the exception of Windows requesting that I disable the cache.

3) Mobo: Possibly the Bios, possibly the IDE connectors, possibly just a bad board, too much else I don't know about motherboards to go into that might be the issue.

Any ideas, or suggested solutions?

 

[DieHardware]

<< I had to reseat the video card every few weeks to get it to even POST >>

Are you moving the computer around alot(LAN parties?)? Could you have knocked something loose(IDE cable etc) when you insalled the burner? Also referring to your third culprit, did you try a different IDE cable for the HDD? Did you try a different P/S?

 

[Kostya]

I tried changing everything you mentioned besides the P/S.

However, after reading through the "k7s5a problem" thread, I think that in all probability, I am victim to the same issue plaguing many other K7s5a owners. A bad resistor for non XP processors, and as such I am probably gonna go out and buy a new mobo(Cheaper than a new CPU.)

 

[ku]

try different ram. K7S5A has a lot of issues with ram.