Catastrophic Failure (Perhaps)

[iamtrout]

Sorry, this may be long.

System Config:
Shuttle AN51R nForce3 250
80gig boot and 120GB slave on primary PCI IDE Controller card (booting from a controller card)
2x160GB on secondary PCI IDE Controller Card
2x160GB on Primary Motherboard IDE
2xOpticals on Secondary Motherboard IDE

Here's what happened (running WinXP):

I went to go browse my Network Places. Got an error saying network path not found. I can't even see my OWN computer on the network, AND it was working less than an hour ago. I mutter "f*cking microsoft" and decide that I have to restart to get network functionality back. But since I have 20 windows open I decide to just hibernate and start back up and see if that helps.

I tell my computer to hibernate, and this is where sh!t started to hit the fan.

1. Click 'Hibernate'
2. After less than three seconds all 5 of my hard drives besides the boot drive spin down suddenly from seemingly lack of power. It didn't sound like a controlled spindown.
3. The drives tried to spin back up, and succeeded.
4. All this time Windows is showing that Hibernation progress bar. Immediately when it got to completion, and I mean immediately, everything in my computer shut off.
5. At this time I'm like "That wasn't good. It was an unusually rough hibernation."
6. I turn the computer back on and it gets stuck at POST during the detecting IDE drives thing. No IDE drives are detected. My keyboard gets locked up so that 'del' and 'esc' don't work, meaning I can't get into BIOS.

Things I have tried (all produce the same thing as in #6 above). All are with ONLY the boot drive hooked up to power:
1. unplug all hard drives except boot
2. unplug all hard drives and switch boot drive's power connector with another on a different power line.
3. switch boot from Controller Card's Primary to Mobo's Primary IDE channel
4. unplug computer, wait two minutes, plug back in, start up

WTF is wrong? This just happened a few minutes ago and I still have a lot of homework to do tonight...

My PSU is Fortron Blue Storm 500W with rock solid rails. It could support all of my system components with ease.

 

[tiap]

Just for fun remove all hdrive and boot from floppy to dos prompt if possible. You have to get into bios somehow. I've had problems with sp2 on multiple drives with multiple os's and problems went away with sp1. Just a thought.

 

[iamtrout]

I have no floppy.

Even with ALL hard drives removed the system still shows the same error as in #6 above (can't detect IDE drives).

So I think hibernation somehow fvcked up my mobo. Why? How? Is there some bug in Microsoft's hibernation code that prematurely cuts power to the hard drives, creating a dangerous "plug and play"/"hot swap" situation with my IDE drives?

 

[tiap]

Can you get into your bios?

 

[iamtrout]

No. My keyboard gets locked up. No keys respond. The lights on the caps lock, num lock, and scroll lock ALL light up and refuse to turn off.

 

[tiap]

I would try to reset the cmos with the jumper. Check manual.

 

[iamtrout]

YES! It worked!

Man... I'm getting so old. There was once a time when the first thing I woulda done was reset the cmos jumper. And now I'm in a state of "why didn't I think of that?"

*shakes head*

Thanks tiap. You're the new l33t h4xx0r now. It's time for me to get my worthless n00b ass back to homework.