Need help with Tyan SCSI motherboard

[jldodge]

I have a Tyan S2665 motherboard with dual Intel processors, 4GB of RAM and onboard SCSI. I had an auxiliary hard drive that went bad so I stuck it in the freezer to try and revive it long enough to get data copied onto another drive. C drive is setup with two Seagate Cheetah drives configured in RAID 0. When I booted up, the aux drive was not recognized but the boot continued okay. After I removed the drive and stuck in a new aux drive (Seagate Cheetah already formatted), the system would not bootup. I have tried to boot from floppy and CD ... does not work. I cannot even get into the BIOS utility. The power light is on, the drives have power but there is no processing going on. I removed 2 memory sticks, rebooted, then tried removing the other two sticks ... no change.

Can you please help me with some suggestions? I would like to determine if it is the motherboard before I plunk down some money for a new one. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance ...

 

[NXIL]

Dear J,

that sux.

That said, first thing I would do would be to clear the CMOS, both with the jumper, and with the battery out of the motherboard for a while; and, since it's 3 years old, maybe replace it. (Manual, page 12, jumper J50).

That said, I would look for bulging capacitors on the mobo, or ones that are leaking.

Would check and make sure a screw didn't fall in somewhere and short out mobo somehow.

Actually, here is a pretty good dead mobo troubleshooting checklist:

http://www.duxcw.com/faq/mb/deadmb.htm

HTH,

NXIL

 

[jldodge]

You are a life saver! Clearing the CMOS worked ... system is now up and running. For my benefit, how did swapping out drives affect the CMOS? I was desparate enough to try another forum who tried to help but did not come up with the technical solution that you did. Since I am learning alot via this forum, would appreciate a bit of background for future reference. Thanks again ...

 

[NXIL]

Hey J,

hooray!

I think that the BIOS was looking for the exact same drive configuration that was there before the drive died--when it did not find it, instead of giving you an error message, it just got stuck apparently. (I have a Tyan mobo that acts the same way--I would like to think that this is by design, i.e. you have a server, a drive goes bad, mobo does not boot up ignoring it.....I guess Tyan figures that we will be able to figure it out without an error message.)

Anyway, glad that helped!

NXIL