SERIOUS WinXP Issue; Please Help!

I've had some computer problems before, but nothing like this. This is so bad, and so random, that I haven't got a clue where to begin in troubleshooting it.

I recently traded for a motherboard from a forum member, an ECS K7S5A Pro. To go with it, I purchased an Athlon XP 2400+ and a Seagate Barracuda ATA V 120GB. I partitioned the drive and formatted it NTFS, which I've not used before. Then, I installed WinXP Pro. All of the other parts in this machine were grandfathered from my previous computer. This is my first time not going with Intel, and so far it's been a real bummer.

I have noticed three smaller issues with this machine, which may or may not be related:

* I can't get a floppy drive to work with it. I've tried a couple of drives that I know work fine, and a couple of cables... nothing. But strangely, I couldn't get a floppy drive to work in my previous computer, either. The common bond between the two computers is the power supply... although that's awfully strange, and the power supply has exhibited no problems whatsoever (Enermax Whisper 350W, all rails seem fine).

* Sometimes I can hit the power, and the fans and drives will start spinning, but the computer doesn't attempt to boot. No video signal, no beep from the speaker. I hit the power again, and it starts up. I did not have this problem with my old computer, using the same power supply.

* I initially tried just swapping in the new motherboard and CPU and booting into Windows on my old installation, and I wasn't able to. I just got a black screen; no error. Couldn't boot into safe mode, either. But then, everybody knows you're supposed to install fresh when you get a new motherboard, so I didn't think much of it at the time.

But here's the main thing:

I began to get the system set up, and my programs and drivers installed, when after a reboot I got popup after popup saying "delayed write failiure". I kept rebooting the computer, but each time Windows would come up with a number of new warnings saying that important files couldn't be found. My file system was corrupting itself beyond belief.

Microsoft's knowledge base recommends using a different IDE cable (but I've BEEN using the cable with no problems), or disabling write behind caching (which I tried, and I still got the error).

I did find that I was able to boot the system into safe mode without any problem, leading me to believe that possibly the issue doesn't appear when your drives are in PIO mode.

Check this out for more information about this error:

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/2458

Possible causes mentioned in this thread include the hard drive, ATI Radeons, and USB 2.0 enclosures.

Well, the hard drive passed Seagate's diagnostic checker with no problem, and bad hardware is so uncommon that I'm not inclined to blame it.

My motherboard has four onboard USB ports, and a few extra headers on the motherboard. I had two of the ports routed up to my Nexus front panel, and a third port is being used by my mouse. Interestingly, when I looked in the device manager, I saw that root hubs were listed by both VIA and SIS. That seemed a little strange to me, but maybe it's normal.

I do have a Radeon 9000 Pro. It's never given me a problem, although ATI's driver support in WinXP seems a little spotty to me. One thing though, I think I may have installed the AGP drivers for my motherboard AFTER installing Catalyst 3.2. Seems strange that this would destroy my file system, but what do you all think?

I'm at a loss for what steps I should take to troubleshoot this issue. I could try going back to my old motherboard and keeping the hard drive. I could try disabling more of the motherboard's onboard features. I could try installing my motherboard's drivers before anything else, this time. I could try formatting FAT32 instead of NTFS (but then, with no floppy, I dunno how I'd do that).

If any of you can come up with some ideas here, I'd really appreciate it. I'm stumped.

Oh, and I thought of a couple more strange things I ran across.

One, Windows seemed to treat the computer like it was AT rather than ATX. When I went to shut the computer down, "Standby" wasn't an option - and I actually saw the old "It is now safe to turn off your computer" screen, rather than having the computer turn itself off. I never saw anything like that before, with the same case and power supply.

And two, I got a message when I first powered the system on saying that the CMOS battery was low. This is apparently a known issue with this motherboard, so I ignored it. I never lost my configuration settings when I was setting the computer up... but could a bad battery possibly cause file system corruption? That seems awfully unlikely.

Anyway, thought I'd add those details.

Sounds like you've got a whole load of stuff to figure out.

Before I say anything, I just want to get something out in the open: I hate the K7S5A. I bought one and had some strange problems with it, like needing to do a hard reset of the CMOS every time I warm booted. My impression of the board was that it was cheap for a reason. Supposedly the problem I had with mine was fixed by a later revision, but I didn't want to find out. With that said, let's see what we can do...

The floppy issue is just plain weird. If you've got a good drive & good cable, the controller's enabled in BIOS, and you have the correct drive type selected in BIOS, it should work. Check to make sure you've got the ribbon cable oriented correctly, as it can be pretty easy to connect the cable backward. (The usual symptom for a backward cable is the drive access LED staying lit constantly.)

The power issue seems a little strange. I doubt it's the power supply, and if that hunch is correct, that limits the problem to the power switch itself, the motherboard, or the cable that connects the two. I guess you can test whether or not it's the switch easily enough: temporarily swap the wires for the reset button and power switch if you can. They're both just momentary switches, so you should be able to use one for the other's function. If you make your reset button the power switch and all works well, you know it's something with the button or wire. Otherwise, it's the mobo or power supply.

On to the biggie... Even if your IDE cable had been working correctly, I'd suggest you swap it out. Your cable could have been damaged when you swapped it into the new system, or it's possible that there's just a problem with it that didn't manifest itself in your old system. If your new motherboard supports higher transfer rates than your old one, that could be one cause for the problems to start happening now when they weren't there before. Also double-check your jumper settings on the hard drive, particularly if your IDE channel configuration has changed. Other possible but less likely causes for data corruption are bad/incompatible RAM or overheating.

Regarding the AT vs. ATX symptoms you mentioned (like the "safe to shut down" screen), those are related to your power management settings. HERE is a page that gives a brief description of the problem -- scroll down to the section labeled "Computer doesn’t power down when users shut down". You should probably have an ACPI HAL installed, and Windows should automatically detect that if you have ACPI enabled in BIOS when you install Windows. If not, you can press F5 right at the beginning of the blue-screen portion of Windows setup and manually select an ACPI HAL. (Press F5 repeatedly as soon as the blue screen appears, and don't stop pressing until you get the HAL selection screen or beeps telling you the keyboard buffer is full.)

Alright, here's what I'm trying first.

First off, the floppy issue had a "duh" solution. I had set it up in the main configuration, but on a seperate screen in the BIOS setup, the controller was still disabled. So I enabled it. Problem solved.

Currently I'm formatting the OS partition on the drive FAT32. It's what I know.

I have swapped out my old rounded IDE cable (which looks to be 18 inches, but maybe it exceeds the ATA spec by an inch or two) for a plain jane ATA66/100 ribbon cable. My old hard drives were also running at ATA100, but they were Western Digital, where the new drive is Seagate... which might just have less tolerance if the cable exceeds ATA spec.

Finally, I'm going to make sure that I install my motherboard's AGP drivers PRIOR to installing the Catalyst drivers.

So, we'll see if any of those steps make a difference.

Well, it appears that I've resolved this issue. However, check this out to find out about a new issue that's just as bad. Gosh, this has been frustrating!

Even if the rounded cable doesn't exceed 18", you can sometimes have problems with crosstalk on rounded cables on rare occasions. Every other conductor in those 80-conductor cables is a ground, used to separate data lines and reduce crosstalk. Cram 'em all back together in a rounded cable, and your crosstalk levels go up somewhat -- maybe enough to cause the problem you were having. (Or on the other hand... maybe the cable just went bad when being moved around.)