Warning...this post has a bunch of computerese. If things like technical computer specs make you sleepy, do not read this post and operate heavy machinery at the same time. On the other hand, if you are into computers, maybe you have some ideas to help me figure out a problem.

OK, I make a living at a computer. I've worked with them almost daily for about 20 years, and know my way around them pretty well. I've built several from scratch, and have no reservations about swapping out a motherboard or installing any hardware or software.

That said, my main computer at home has me (and all the techie friends and co-workers I've spoken to) stumped. I've been having sporadic lockups and apparent hard disk failures with this system for the past 10 months or so, and in the process of trying to track that problem down, I've replaced about 750GB worth of disk drives (I use a lot of disk space), the CD and DVD burners, motherboard, IDE disk controller card, and finally, the power supply. Swapping out the power supply seemed to do the trick with the lockup problem and no disk drives have failed in the past couple of months.

This system was running like a champ until I logged off last night (about 3:30 AM). Went into my home office this morning (I'm still on Tuesday...my body clock is skewed) and the monitors were black, and they wouldn't wake up to the mouse. I did the three-finger salute, and the system restarted normally enough, with the BIOS splash screen followed by the POST data. About the time I'd expect the boot sequence to hit the initial Windows startup blue screen (not the BSOD), the screen goes blank. No HD activity, no nothing, just dead.

No worries, I'll restore from a PowerQuest Drive Image backup (a .pqi file), like I've done a hundred times. (I swap boots fairly regularly to switch to different language versions of Windows XP and 2000, and restoring disk images is easier and less problematic than having multiple boots in multiple languages.) Anyway, I pop the Drive Image CD in the bay to boot into the "Recovery Environment", and again things start normally enough, the boot sequence starts to read the CD, the usual message is displayed saying "Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration", and then nothing. It hangs with the message displayed, and will stay that way for hours.

Further investigation showed that the BIOS sees all the RAM and the primary and secondary IDE channels (correctly identifying the devices connected to them). Sinced about the only things on the system that I'd not replaced in the past 6 months were the processor (an Athlon 2700XP) and the memory (two 512 MB sticks of no-name PC1600 DDR), and since I suspected the previously dicey power supply might have damaged the processor in some way, I went to the local Frys tonight and picked up a new Sempron 3000 processor. Since my relatively new ASUS motherboard can support a 400 mhz FSB and the Sempron can take advantage of better memory than I currently owned, I also picked up a 1 GB stick of Kingston's "HyperX" PC3200 400Mhz memory. It's their high-end stuff...better than I'd normally buy.

A little electronic surgery later, I had the new processor and memory in their new homes, powered up the box and...same thing. Hangs in exactly the same ways and places in the boot sequence. The BIOS sees and properly identifies the new processor and memory. I haven't tried booting from a Win98 floppy yet. I don't have one, and although I downloaded one from bootdisk.com, the only computer in the house that has a floppy drive is the dead one on my desk, so the downloaded image is stuck on a floppy-less computer (the one I'm typing this on now). I'll make one tomorrow at the office, but I have my doubts that it'll get any better results than I've seen already.

I'm pretty much out of ideas, although I'm beginning to suspect my relatively "new" motherboard has gone south on me. I have a spare one lying around (the one I replaced a few months ago), so tomorrow I'll probably try dropping that in to see what happens. If it works, I'm not looking forward to rebuilding and reinstalling all my apps. If it doesn't work, I may be considering taking this box off into a canyon and having a bit of target practice with the 30.06. I've got some 180-grain elk loads that'd unstick a tight drive bay for sure. (I wouldn't really do this, but it's tempting sometimes.)

If any of you who have managed to read all the way through this sordid story have any ideas or suggestions, I'm open to them. I really don't want to go buy a new system, but I also need to have a reliable computer (about the same way a professional woodworker needs a reliable table saw).

Thanks in advance -

- Vaughn