I HATE intermittent faults.

soup · January 13, 2015

I was having a 'look' at a system prior to its mid-life update (handing it on to No2 son and would like it to be better/faster than it is now).

Saw it had lots of propreitry bits but could upgrade others so put it back together but lo and behold it wouldb't work, "silly me I will have left something unconnected " so took the cover off again checked everything was in place . Still wouldn't (I thought) go past the POSTing splash screen . Was beggining to think I had done something really bad . After ten minutes of taking the side off "inspecting " things putting the side back on and looking at the POST screen decided to have a break (cup of coffee, just by chance I had left it POSTing) found out it wasn't not POSTing it was just taking a long time .

To cut a long story short after two hours of disabling/enabling things in the BIOS (each one taking nearly a minute to POST and BOOT), tracked it to the SATA sockets, only two of the drives were reporting at any one time so another two hour round of swap sockets disable/enable sockets,sometimes a "fix" worked the once only to fail the next time, each time a fix worked I would think "ah thats got it" only for it to fail next time this part was seriously disheartening I like to pride myself on knowing how things work and what the fault is when it doesn't but this time I was at a loss., luckilly the fault lasted long enough for me to think "ah ha it is the ODD that is bad" the system is having trouble finding it hence the very long POST decided to swap the drive with one I had lying upstairs this didn't seem to fix it .

Eventually had a 'eureka' moment and decided to try a SATA cable from N^o2 son's old computer now it worked, put the old drive back still everything worked.

So all the effort could have been saved if the cable damage was apparent or the connectors were hanging of or something but this working one minute not the next nearly drove me mental.