absolutely baffling mobo(?) problem

[senspoof]

[PCguy]

[senspoof]

well heres the thing...if i boot into knoppix from a cd it will run just fine for days, no problems at all, so how could a fried CPU not effect that?

[brad]

Just a thought.... How is your Bios setup to boot? Maybe running Linux from CD has it recognizing that drive first. Worth a check.
brad

[Restek]

What you've described certainly sounds like a problem with the hard drives - since you've ruled out the actual hard drive, it has to be either the cable or the IDE interface

That said, a bad HDD wouldn't normally give you beep codes - that is normally related to memory or graphics card. Have you tried reseating these components?

[senspoof]

i tried swapping IDE cables as well as resetting the RAM and the video card. the problem still occurs, so the only thing must be the IDE interface? what would this mean a new mobo?

[Restek]

Either that or you can buy PCI expansion cards giving you extra IDE connectors (normally for RAID, but they will do fine for single drives too).

[senspoof]

another odd aspect of this problem is that if i let the computer sit for a day or so and then use it, it will sometimes get into knoppix AND the hard drive will be accessible. after a while if you contiue to access the drive, it will crash (strange vertical lines of different colors will appear across the screen and nothing responds). how can this be explained?

[Restek]

[senspoof]

so in order to try and remedy this problem i replaced the mother board. however, this did not solve it. also, replacing the video card and sound card had no effect. i have also tried two different sticks of ram. none of this had any effect. so now, the only things left to replace are the cd roms, the power supply (which is an antec truepower 550 W) and the processor (AMD XP 2400+)...what could still be causing the problem?