I just had a machine fail. And not just any machine, the machine.

I had recently, in the last 45 days, replaced the case and power supply. Upgraded it to a Thermaltake Soprano case with I think a 420W power supply.

I turned the machine off middle of last week and when I went to turn it, nothing. Took a wild guess that it was the power supply and took it back to the shop for testing. Sure enough, the PS was DOA. Picked up a new PS and tried it for a few hours on the old hardware, but only got as far as it powering up but no post. Figured that the motherboard might be bad so I picked up a new Motherboard and Processor and tried the Power Supply for another 4 hours. The system would power up, but not post.

At this point, I'm ready to become a meat packer. I took the Motherboard and the Power Supply back to the shop and the Power Supply tested with a bad 3.3 Rail so I got that replaced. Now the system will boot and If I don't put any hard drives in it will post.

I've said all of this, to ask the following: Does anyone know if Windows 2000 has problems with Athlon 64 processors or if there is a memory limit? And, what is the best way to diagnose hard drives if the system won't even post so that you can run the manufacturer diagnostics?

Sytem Specs:

Gigabyte GA-K8NSU-939 Motherboard
Athlon 64 3000+ Processor
2 Gig (4 x 512) DDR400 (PC3200) Running Dual Channel
Generic Floppy
Iomega Zip-100 Drive
Lite-On DVD-Burner

Hard Drives:

Western Digital 80GB
Western Digital 250GB
Seagate 120GB
Maxtor 120GB
Maxtor 80GB
Maxtor 80GB
Maxtor 80GB
The system will detect the Maxtor Drives and get to the point where it is looking for an OS to boot. I can't install Windows 2000. It results in an I/O error during the Windows 2000 Setup.

How are the HDDs configured? Any SATAs and any RAID setup?

What OS was running when the computer was working OK?

I would try the drives on their own and one by one to check that they are then recognised by the BIOS. If so then you should be able to run the diagnostics. If individually not recognised by the BIOS and cables, connectors, jumpers are definitely OK I would think that drive is dead. Just having one dodgy drive connected can screw up any of the other ones.

Thanks for the reply Paul. I ended up doing some additional testing late today. I was able to boot from the main drive without problems on a test motherboard which confirmed that the drive is fine. It appears that the mobo itself has been damaged at some point. I also took the whole system back to the shop late this evening. They ran a system diagnostic on it and were prepared to blame the drive but then they tried hooking up a WD drive to this board and it was just locking the system exactly like it had been doing with mine. They told me to bring the motherboard back in the morning and they would run another test and most likely replace the board. I hope it works, cause I really need to get some work done.

And I would really like to see how fast this is gonna go once it done.

Changed out the board and spent the day rebuilding the beast. As my signature now reflects, it is working and it runs very well. I can launch most any application with no delay. Very, very nice.