I\u2019ve been incommunicado for a bit due to yet another computer malfunction. This was a truly bizarre one, and the diagnosis I made, strange and unlikely as I thought it was, turned out to be correct. It\u2019s a reminder that computers can fail in rather odd ways.<\/p>\n
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First, because I back up my stuff<\/a>, I was never in any danger of actually losing anything. Since I am in the midst of working on my capstone project for my MSST degree<\/a>, I\u2019m backup stuff up in about a half-dozen different ways. I\u2019m not quite sure what it would take to lose what I have, but the complete devastation of a large swath of this country is probably a necessary condition. So as before, this outage was more annoying than anything else.<\/p>\n It started when my computer shut down suddenly and without warning. Upon reboot, the motherboard, as ASUS M3N78-EM, would not detect either of my hard drives. They simply didn\u2019t exist. For one boot in twenty, my drives were detected, but that lasted an hour or two at most. Aside from that problem, nothing else was wrong: the POST was successful, and there were no error messages aside from not detecting drives. I rearranged and moved drives around, even trying them one at a time, but nothing worked. It seemed that the motherboard had failed in such a way as to not be able to detect the drives, but otherwise show no other faults.<\/p>\n Testing this required a new motherboard, which I got from Memory4Less<\/a>. I had few options since the board was two years old and out of production. They very helpfully upgraded me to overnight delivery, and I moved everything over from the old motherboard to the new, identical one. And lo and behold, it worked perfectly. Clearly, the old motherboard actually was at fault.<\/p>\n