6 months and I've only made the problem worse.

I don't even know where to begin with this. I've never been defeated so horribly. I cannot make any sense of this problem. I'm having the problems on the system shown below. Beginning about six months ago I started having these problems.
I would get blue screens once inawhile and there would be different error messages every time. Finally the o.s. hard drive started making a horrible buzzing and so I swapped it out for a different one. Alright... things seem to be going alright.
I leave my computer on for a week or so and there's no problems...until something causes me to have to restart. Half the time the drives aren't recogonized upon boot-up and if they are windows freezes mid boot. Usually after an hour of tinkering.. reorganizing the drives, shouting profanities and putting my fist through a wall it will reboot again.. until another week goes by and the same process repeats itself.
Now the o.s. drive I swapped out before is making excessive clicking sounds when booting. So I think maybe this one is bad.. just like the last one was bad.. I'm really burning through the drives here.. but that's alright, i've got drives laying all over. So today I pull out my seagate drive that i bought new a month ago. Naturally my motherboard doesnt recogonize the seagate...but in only 1 configuration... three drives have to be hooked up including the clicky one with the o.s. on it now and the jumper settings have to be a set a particular way.. and in this and only this way will the seagate be recognized.. i've tried absolutely every other configuration.
This btw makes it impossible to install an o.s. to the new drive because if I try to hook up the cd burner with the Seagate it won't be recognized.

Here's a list of other things I've tried.. new ram... flashing m/b bios to latest.. Shouting profanities in a condescending manner towards the motherboard and hard drives and generally flipping the f*&k out. Running a different processor.. I think that's it.

PLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEASE HELLLLLLLLLLLLP ME. This is my main audio computer and it runs all my audio software and hardware, without this thing thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment is currently rendered absolutely useless. I feel like I should just get a new motherboard but i've already dumped enough money into arbitrarily replacing parts on this thing.. if I get a new motherboard I would have basically just replaced every part on this computer, if that's the only answer i'll do it.. but I really need to be able to fix crap like this and not just throw money at it.

 

Thanks very much for the reply Tim, here are the answers to your questions...

1.....have you tried removing all the other drives (hard) and booting up with the seagate setup utility ...then try install os in it?

With all other things removed from the ide's except the single seagate drive it won't be recognized by bios no matter what jumper setting it's on, I tried to install the seagate utility but it won't start from the a: disk and if it does it keeps asking me for a second disk.. for the one disk program. Plus if bios isn't intially recognizing the drive anyway does the utility even any good?

2. Have you run Everest on it to look at what it reports or run memtest?

At this point there is no booting anymore from the previous o.s. drive, it's making god awful banging sounds that sounds like the control arm is smacking the inside of the drive and it's just not good. I think she's pretty much dead, hopefully I can recover her long enough to get some data off it. Something gives me the feeling though that although the thing sounds terrible it could be fine because this computer just seems to be ruining hdd's so.. I dunno, but in answer to your questions.. no I have not run those because I can't possibly get anything to boot on here, I couyld maybe get a boot disk but those programs aren't dos executable are they?

3.What is the exact error code on the BSOD?
There were always different ones, there would be "unmountable boot volume" a couple times, then i'd run chkdsk /r and that would let it boot that time.. until it had to be restarted a week later.

 

Alright, I happened to have a brand new ide cable available, I switched that in, took out all but one stick of ram... tried the seagate in cable select and master/single jumper setting... won't recognize it.

You've set the bios boot order to cdrom as first?

No, I think it's set to floppy right now. There is no cdrom plugged in, I removed everything except the single seagate drive from the ide bus'.

 

Just out of curiosity when was the last time your CMOS battery was changed, I ask because it sounds like either BIOS our Ram problem, and you have kinda eliminated Ram

 

yeah, I thought about the cmos battery for a second.. it's been.. well, I got the board like 3 years ago probly. I've never run into an error or anything with it though. I threw in a different one though for the heck of it just now.. we'll see what happens.

I got sick of trying the seagate drive so I threw in an old fujitsu drive that was known to be working I just never use it. It gets recognized by bios as does the cdrom, YAY! It goes into booting from the cdrom.. "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration...." then the screens go into standby and nothing happens.... sweet.

 

I assume and thats usually a dumb thing to do, but you are saying that it is still hanging????????????????? Have you checked your BIOS after installing the new Battery

 

I feel as though I should also note that the seagate would work in this configuration before...

IDE Bus 1-
Seagate, cable select
Western digital, cable select

IDE Bus 2-
Western Digital, cable select

Bios was recognizing it and windows would recognize it, though it would be intermittent in windows, it seemed like whenever I would try to start moving data to it windows would lose it.

 

Yeah, it goes into windows setup from the cd-rom then the screens go into standby and I got nothin'. Actaully the Fujitsu isn't being recognized either.. I misread the boot screen. So maybe it exits setup because it doesnt detect a hdd?

I do actually have another KT4V laying around too that I could try.. that one was taken out of service though because the computer was acting funny and it couldnt be determined why. That was with different hardware though. I feel like if I swap that out though and even swap a different proccesor everything will just be too hard to keep track of with whats what and whats working and whats not, especially since systems have their quirks whenever you swap in different boards anyways.

 

Hi, ex. My background is industrial electronics, not really stuff like desktop computers. Anyway, I can't help but wonder if you have damaged your power supply with 3 hard drives and other stuff. That sounds like a pretty good load on a 300W supply. I would like to suggest a considerably bigger power supply, 500W or so. Just an idea, may be way off in left field. Let us know what you get. Good night and good luck.

 

Good suggestion, never thought of that and the PSU is an easy swap, did you reset the BIOS when you installed the new battery........means leaving battery out for a couple of minutes but I knew you knew that one. Might want to get Everest from MG and check those Volts..........

Check List:- RAM....BIOS...PSU, other than that just plain shot MB is all that comes to mind

 

It's actually a Antec True Power 380 maximum. It was supposedly a pretty robust supply. I remember I researched a bit and read that this thing was supposed to be pretty solid. I paid like a 100 bucks for it, I'll be kinda pissed if thats the problem. I only had three drives running off it for the past month or so too. So I dunno. It's probly warrantied. Seeing as how I can't get this machine to boot into an o.s. though how would I be able to test to see if it's the problem? I can monitor the voltages in bios but it's not really coming under load at that point. I have a DMM I could probe the outputs from it. I'm not really sure whats acceptable readings in this situation though.

I did also try as you said Tim and got that Seagate drive setup on my other computer... everything worked fine right away on the other computer. I actually put an o.s. on it and dropped it in the problem computer and it seemed to work then the Seagate drive started replicating the same noises that the one that the other one was making. It sounds like the drives keep trying to get started then they reset, basically like you're just hitting the reset button over and over again every second.... which would be the case I guess if inefficient amounts of power were getting to them. I'll try and swap in a different supply, unfortunately I think that may be the one thing spare that I don't have lying around. I think I'm gonna bring the thing into a shop by here though and poke at it with the guys there.

Thanks for the help everyone, I spent 8 hours trying to fix this thing today... 8 hours.

 

Yea I think we have all been there at one time or another excellrec and its a frustrating time........The more I think about your situation the more I lean toward a faulty PSU, especially given the drive noise and the fact that it worked fine in the other Comp......Antec PSU's are usually rock solid, but hey even a RR breaks down.......post back and let us know Okay

 

So you wanna try an OS on the seagate but cant use a cdrom,with the two drives connected and being recognized in disk manager control panel\admin tools\comp management\disk manager format the drive to make sure its working then create a mirror of your current drive using this

http://majorgeeks.com/Acronis_True_Image_d2236.html

Set your computer to boot from the seagate,you may be asked to select an os upon reboot which will both be identical the one at the top will be connected to ide 0

EDIT I'v posted this but missed reading the reply's due to your original post being on a page of its own,I'm not sure if my post is relavent to your current position,so I apologise

 

Well, hopefuly i'm not speaking too soon but I think it's been proven as a power supply. I took it to the local shop and the guy there concurred that the drives sounded like they were resetting due to lack of power. I came home and actually found 2-3 power supplies laying around . Currently I have a robust 140watt power supply made by "Deer" in there. I'm trying to limp it along with just two drives and the motherboard and processor running off the power supply until I can get the Antec warranty repaired. The drives I thought were bad though are looking to be ok now and not replicating any of the horrible noises anymore.

If it keeps working and it was the supply I'll be pretty happy about all this. For a long time now I haven't been able to trust this machine and that's a bad thing when it holds all my musical works on it's drives. Plus drives I thought were dead actually work and the repair should be free, so besides time and maybe shipping a little power supply I haven't paid a dime for the repair. Thanks alot to everybody that responded, I'm very grateful for a forum like this where people who are actually educated and experienced with fixing these blasted machines take the time to respond to my problems.