Possible fried motherboard???

[HomerSapien]

I have no idea what is happening. I have an old dell m200s. I was going to install linux on it. During the install, it keeps saying i/o error when it goes to formatting the hard drive on 3 different distributions of rhat and madrake.

I have switched hard drives between the one that came with it, a western digital caviar 3.2GB and a maxtor 1.6GB drive from an old compaq. I have tried several different ide cables. Still I/O errors. Now, it is not even going to the boot screen and neither hard drive would spin up. But they work fine in other computers. There are no error beeps from the computer, so the video card must be working and the monitor works fine. The zip is initiated and the cdrom spins up, but the hard drive wont. Any ideas on how to get this working, or is it possible the motherboards ide controller was somehow fried?

 

[helpme]

Try another Cable?

 

[HomerSapien]

I mentioned i had tried different ones....Thx though

 

[HomerSapien]

anyone??

 

[monckywrench]

Did the BIOS autodetect any hard drives correctly? Will it boot from floppy with no hard drives connected? Will it boot Windows or DOS formatted drives? If everything else works try an add-on PCI hard drive controller if ya have one available to swap in.
If the motherboard is a standard form factor places like liquidationetc.com have new-old-stock boards cheap (like 25-30 bucks). I usually go that route rather than buy cards. Another possible problem is that some chipsets will not always boot RPM based distros properly! I had a SD-P5TA board that would refuse to load them from CD or boot them from a preloaded drive. It would, amazingly, accept Windows and Debian-based Linux distros just fine. I do not recall the chipset, 440?X, but the problem was consistent.Try Debian, Corel, etc, and see what ya get.

 

[HomerSapien]

Thx monkywrench.... I did manage to get it to even show the bios now. It worked by chance. I took off the zip drive and tried it with only cdrom, hard drive, and floppy. I used mandrake 7.2. It would get though the formatting part, the star would go green and then it would come up with more errors. The options it suggested only lead to more errors. I am going to take a hard drive out of another computer and try it in it.

If nothing works, oh well.