Well, today I was proven wrong. A couple of years ago, when family and friends asked me to build them cheap computers I opted to build on the G31/ICH7 platform seeing as how socket 775 cpu's were cheap and good performers. I put one together for each set of grandparents when they needed computers, a few for customers, and used p45 for my father and myself so that there would be a steady supply of s775 cpu's and ddr2 for any situation that may arise.
Recently, I decided to use a Zotac G31 board for a media pc for the living room and that machine was working fine. My grandfather had complained about his computer not working right (one of the g31 boards) and I told him to bring it over when he came to visit for Christmas so I could take a look at it for him. I hooked it up and it was working fine. I ran Malware Bytes on it since he mentioned that he had some sort of fake antivirus messages on his computer recently. The system came up clean and I blew the dust out of the machine and thought everything was good to go. Sure enough, the computer shut down out of nowhere and I couldn't get it to POST after seemingly working normally. Finally, when it did post the POST screen text was all messed up, which seemed to indicate that the integrated video was going bad somehow. I figured since it is integrated into the northbridge that this board wasn't worth screwing around with anymore so I pulled the Zotac board out of the computer next to it and started to switch out the bad board, figuring we could go over to Microcenter after Christmas and get a better board to replace the Zotac.
Long story short, after getting the Zotac installed, I got the message, "Operating System Not Found." Tried clearing cmos, changing boot order, went into recovery console and tried fixboot, fixmbr, etc and still could not get it to work. Even tried a repair installation, still got the error message after that. No matter what, simply could not get it to boot up to his Windows XP installation. My theory that I could just switch boards with same chipset didn't work for me at all this time.
I was getting pissed off because I had to work later that day, and grandpa had to head home at 3 because his eyesight isn't the best so he can't drive at night and its a 3 hour drive. He needed his computer because he is retired and just sells stuff on ebay to make some money. Ultimately I ended up using an extra sata hard drive we had lying around and installing a new copy of XP on it and getting him set up on it. He didn't really have anything on the old hard drive but its still a pain because his printer, webcam, etc still needed to be setup when he got home and he would have to get set up all over again. That and the whole thing was done so fast that the motherboard drivers were hastily installed, and I hope the damn thing performs ok (It was acting kind of flaky) I hope the ram is compatible as originally I had problems with incompatible ram when I first built the thing.
The sad part is, if I plugged in the original IDE hard drive I would get "Operating system not found" and then I'd pull the power on that drive and the new hard drive would boot up just fine. Sometimes it really sucks to be the family computer tech.
If anyone has any ideas of what the heck went wrong I'm all ears. I happened to snap a picture with my phone when I first started this project.
Recently, I decided to use a Zotac G31 board for a media pc for the living room and that machine was working fine. My grandfather had complained about his computer not working right (one of the g31 boards) and I told him to bring it over when he came to visit for Christmas so I could take a look at it for him. I hooked it up and it was working fine. I ran Malware Bytes on it since he mentioned that he had some sort of fake antivirus messages on his computer recently. The system came up clean and I blew the dust out of the machine and thought everything was good to go. Sure enough, the computer shut down out of nowhere and I couldn't get it to POST after seemingly working normally. Finally, when it did post the POST screen text was all messed up, which seemed to indicate that the integrated video was going bad somehow. I figured since it is integrated into the northbridge that this board wasn't worth screwing around with anymore so I pulled the Zotac board out of the computer next to it and started to switch out the bad board, figuring we could go over to Microcenter after Christmas and get a better board to replace the Zotac.
Long story short, after getting the Zotac installed, I got the message, "Operating System Not Found." Tried clearing cmos, changing boot order, went into recovery console and tried fixboot, fixmbr, etc and still could not get it to work. Even tried a repair installation, still got the error message after that. No matter what, simply could not get it to boot up to his Windows XP installation. My theory that I could just switch boards with same chipset didn't work for me at all this time.
I was getting pissed off because I had to work later that day, and grandpa had to head home at 3 because his eyesight isn't the best so he can't drive at night and its a 3 hour drive. He needed his computer because he is retired and just sells stuff on ebay to make some money. Ultimately I ended up using an extra sata hard drive we had lying around and installing a new copy of XP on it and getting him set up on it. He didn't really have anything on the old hard drive but its still a pain because his printer, webcam, etc still needed to be setup when he got home and he would have to get set up all over again. That and the whole thing was done so fast that the motherboard drivers were hastily installed, and I hope the damn thing performs ok (It was acting kind of flaky) I hope the ram is compatible as originally I had problems with incompatible ram when I first built the thing.
The sad part is, if I plugged in the original IDE hard drive I would get "Operating system not found" and then I'd pull the power on that drive and the new hard drive would boot up just fine. Sometimes it really sucks to be the family computer tech.
If anyone has any ideas of what the heck went wrong I'm all ears. I happened to snap a picture with my phone when I first started this project.
Last edited:
Facebook
Twitter