Strange Hard Drive Problem

[Gorrillasnot]

hi all....A friend of mine has a PC that when booting would automatically go into the CMOS setup instead of booting windows and he would continually have to put in the correct time and date.
He called me and told me about the problem and I told him to put a new CMOS battery in. The OS still wouldn't boot so he did a fresh install of XP pro and all seemed good. He shut down the PC for the night and when he tried booting it the next morning he got a "no system disk" error (or something like that).
He ended up shipping his PC to me to see if I could fix it.
I updated the BIOS to the latest version, checked all the connectors on the motherboard, reinstalled XP and all critical updates etc. I turned the PC on and off several times and all seemed good. I left it turned off over night and turned it on the next morning and it fired right up. I thought great the BIOS update musta been the fix.
I then decided to unplug the power cord while I was out running some errands. It had been unplugged for 4 hours or so when I returned. I plugged it back in and hit the power button and it hung on the POST screen saying something like "detecting hard drive press F4 to skip" (or something to that affect) all the while the hard drive light was lit solid like something was accessing it real hard. I left it stay that way for about 5 min and nothing happened so I hit the reset button and again the same thing happened. I repeated this about 4 or 5 times and finally it booted up.
I ran Maxtor's powermax diag utility on it and it found no errors. I also ran SpinRite 6.0 on it but it found and (supposedly) fixed something like 180,000+ errors. I plan to leave it unplugged tonight and see how it does tomorrow, but I'd bet it will still have the same problem. I kinda doubt it is a hard drive issue 'cause once booted up it runs fine with no crashes and it is dead silent. In my past experiences with hard drive failures they would always start to make a clicking noise or loud grinding when they were about to fail.

anyone have any ideas?

PC specs:
Evercase w/ 350W PSU
Asus A7N266-VM/AA onboard audio and video
AthlonXP 1800+
2x 256MB Crucial PC2100
Maxtor 30GB 7200rpm primary master
Lite-On 52x32x52 secondary master
Lite-On 16x DVD-ROM secondary slave
Alps floppy
Realtec 10/100 PCI nic
Windows XP Pro SP1 with all critical updates
Latest nvidia chipset and video drivers

thanks for any help

 

[stevennoland]

The first place I would start with is the power supply. If you have an extra known good one, try that. If problem still persists, try a different hard drive (reinstall OS).

Try placing the hard drive only on the IDE1 master and put the Lite-on 52x CD-R drive on the IDE2 as master and dump the DVD-ROM drive (for now). Also try a different IDE cable for the HD.

If these don't fix your problem, please post back. I'm sure there is someone out there who could help.

 

[AluminumStudios]

We have an old machine at work that behaved that exact same way - after thorough troubleshooting the only thing I could chalk it up to was a hardware failure on the motherboard that was draining the CMOS battery (perhaps some kind of short) or constantly resetting the CMOS. This machine would sometimes be fine between reboots, but sometimes after a few hours, or longer (it was random) of being off it would loose the date and time and sometimes forget about it's hard drive and boot settings.

My suspician is a hardware failure on the motherboard that you're not going to be able to isolate or fix if it's anything like the machine I encountered ....