Scary Sunday Morning...

[Cricket]

Hi all,

Just wanted to relate an incident that happened to me this past weekend. While doing my usual tech website hopping on Sunday morning, my 3 month old PIII 1Ghz PC just stopped responding. The mouse cursor wouldn't respond to the mouse and Ctrl Alt Del did nothing. I noticed the hard drive light was flashing like crazy so I decided to wait awhile to see if would stop and allow me to use my PC again. After a few minutes of non-stop flashing, I turned off the power. When I turned the power back on, I got a message that there was no boot device detected...hmmm...so I reset the computer and went into BIOS to see what was up. The BIOS didn't see my hard drive so I tried a auto-detect. No go...did my 3 month old IBM 60GXP die? No, I could hear it spin up when I rebooted. I checked to see if the IDE cable was loose. No, the cable was installed correctly. Did the on-board IDE controller die...I didn't think so since it knew there was no slave device attached even though there was no entry for the master device. I turned off the PC and replaced the 80 wire IDE cable with a 40 wire and reset the IBM hard drive to ATA33. After a reset, lo and behold, my PC came back to life and I was back at the Windows desktop. I found a spare 80 wire cable, installed it and booted up again (had to reset the IBM back to ATA100) and everything worked fine. So after working fine for 3 months, the original ATA100 cable that came with my EPOX motherboard just up and die, just like that...no warning, nothing. A simple $10 cable brought my PC to it's knees...sheesh.

Cricket