jamesq | Weird-ass Hardware Problem

devoidofthought asked me to get one of the junk PCs working for a friend of hers. I hauled one out and found that it was mostly intact and at least booting as far as the bios.

I went to load Xubuntu onto it and found that the CD-ROM drive wasn't spinning up. i swapped it out with another and found that that one wasn't spinning up either. A quick check confirmed that none of the four drives I had were working.

I then checked them with a different power supply - they all worked. Curiouser and curiouser.

Maybe it was the power supply? Nope, the CD drives worked fine if I just plugged the power in. They stopped working when I plugged the IDE cable in. Attaching the IDE cable stopped them from powering up. I tried a second IDE cable and it had the same result.

Also the hard drive on the same cable spun up.

So instead of making the HDD the master of IDE0 and the CD-ROM drive the slave on IDE0, I flipped them both to cable select for IDE0 and IDE1 respectively. Still didn't work.

At this point I've given up (unless someone has a cheap and easy work-around). I figure there's something wrong with the motherboard and the motherboard is just a PIII/600, so not worth much effort.

I'll go out into the garage tomorrow and pull one of the other junkers. It might be time to fix or toss all of them.