Motherboard Woes
Based on the last week of sporadic experimentation, I’ve concluded the issue with my home computer is related to the motherboard. It doesn’t consistently recognize the presence of the hard drives. Even from the BIOS this system is having trouble seeing the drives… sometimes they appear in the IDE device list, which allows me to attempt a boot. But then the system hangs while loading the OS, and upon reboot does not recognize the drives as being present.
My friend Wally offered sage advice this weekend: the motherboard probably has a bad capacitor. This does make sense given the intermittent behavior of the system. Transistors and diodes rarely fail; when they do, they don’t recover. Resistors usually plow ahead without issue. But capacitors can dry out and become problematic. It seems strange given the pedigree of the motherboard (Intel 845 series) and its age (less than 4 years).
At this point I am exploring my options. I could replace the motherboard and CPU, which will necessitate the acquisition of new RAM and a new video card. The other option would be to simply purchase a new system from Dell. Either way this project will have to wait for a month or two… it’s financially untenable at the moment. There are other computers available for my use at the moment, and there’s no pressing need to resurrect my system. I just want to retrieve my data off the hard drive, then revisit this project as time and money permits.