Weird Issue.

[jl123]

It's a Shuttle SFF comp (socket 370 older version) and when it's inside it's little case it has issues booting up and detecting the hard drive and cdrom but will but takes a really long time. Then once it detects them it won't boot to them.

A month or 2 back it had been having some video card issues and ide detection problems and now I just felt like messing around with it(it had been in sittin in the corner). When I take everything out (psu, mobo, hd, cdrom, etc) and lay it on some cardboard everything works fine and it boots into winxp. Once I stick it back in the case it starts acting up again.

Anyways...my question is what can cause this? Is it not being grounded properly? I don't see how sittin on a piece of cardboard properly grounds it.

Thanks,

 

[Unforgiven]

well being on the cardboard its not metal on metal so its not shorting or grounding it out against the metal of the case. when its mounted in the case, are you using the correct mounting screws and risers? if not you need to use the copper risers (or other kind if they came with the board/case. sounds to me like its grounding out and you pretty much proved that by having it boot fine when not mounted in the case.

 

[jl123]

The mobo risers are built in at the bottom of the little case. It's just 4 of them and when I first bought it a while back it worked fine. So is the mobo supposed to be grounded or not? I'm a bit confused because it was grounded when I first got it and all of a sudden these problems arose and go away if I take it out of the case.

Since I like pics here they are.

 

[johnjkr1]

Wait wait wait. You are actually building a SFF pc with THAT SCSI card!??! You are a madman. Basically, if you have a grounding issue, you have a piece of metal touching something it is not supposed to. Many times it is a screw under the motherboard hitting plastic instead of a metal screw hole. Or it could be that giganitic scsi card hitting something. Have you tried it with a normal IDE hard drive for fun?

 

[jl123]

Oh no when it's inside the case I've tried it without the scsi card(tried it with it also and it fits). Heh, the scsi card is for the tower enclosure that the keyboard and mouse are under(only for external scsi). But I've always been using an IDE drive for the boot drive even when I had it inside the case. It's an old pos 4GB WD drive that I had laying around.

Since I now know that the comp works fine and it's a grounding issue I plan on using it just to hook up my scsi drives because on my main rig it has an issue with my sata raid card with filling up the pci bus and making my audigy glitch. So I'm just gonna use it as a network file server. I know it won't be as fast but just the fact that I already have the drives and don't feel like selling them because I plan on getting together a raid 5 array on my next build which will most likely be on a server board.

 

[cronos]

probably a dropped screw hiding under the board or something to that effect.
try shaking the case, turning it upside down, etc...

 

[jl123]

It's a tiny case and I've taken everything out of it so I don't see anything that could be touching that's not supposed to.

 

[jl123]

MMK!? It works now. Only thing I did was put it back together. Some small things I changed was I tightened up the screws on the mobo more than I ususally do and used shorter screws to attatch the power supply in. I'm confused but whatever. Runs rock stable(primin it overnight).

Thanks for the help guys.

 

[nippyjun]

This is a message for jl123. You pm'ed me but there is no way to reach you as you have it set up not to allow anyone to pm you and your email address you have listed doesn't seem to work.