Tis a sad tale of woe, my wife informd me last week that the media centre has stopped working. I say informed me because I am currently working in Kuwait and won't be home until mid July.
Anyway back to the tale.......
It seems the box just froze one night in the middle of SWMBO and female offspring watching a recording of Lewis. So the quite rightly re-booted the system, only this is all they got was a demand from it for an OS disk.
Via the good graces of Skype or was it Yahoo Messenger I talked the kids through the booting of the system using a BartPE CD and then through the use disk management program on Bart to have a look at the disk, unfortunately they could not find it, the OS disk that is, so thinking that maybe they are using the prog wrong had them go into DriveImageXML to see if that prog could see the OS disk. Alas no such disk was to be found.
Ah! I thought "disk has gone belly-up or one of the cables has come adrift". So had son get the top off and check all connections and anything else he could get his hands on. Tried a reboot but once again bloody thing was demanding an OS disk.
Thought to myself "must be dead disk", so orderd a new one on-line. Took the opertunity to get a 1TB disk with the intention of swapping it for one of the smaller drives in the WHS when I get back home.
When said disk arrived, talked son through getting the old one out, putting the new one in, checking connections etc etc and then had him begin the installation of MCE, intended to get it setup then use BartPE and DriveImageXML to reinstall the system to the way it was.
MS setup went through the partitioning and formatting ok but froze not long after it started copying files. So rebooted and started again, but same result, did it a couple more times all with the same result, the installation froze during the file copying, each freeze was at a different point in the process and while copying different files, so could not be the installation disk.
I then decided that the SATA port on the MOBO was the likely candidate, so had my son swap the (hopefully soon to be ) OS drive from the first port to the second port, the one that untl then had been connected to my recorded TV drive, (which has shown up as being present when the old OS drive didn't). Son then tried to install and same thing happened, install froze. Tried a couple of more times and even swapped the power cables around, all to no avail. Tried resetting the RTC or if you prefer clearing the CMOS but again nothing worked.
Finally had my son attach the original OS drive to another computer just to check that it was really dead, unfortunately it wasn't.
So only conclusion I'm left with is the SATA system on the MOBO has given up the ghost. Ergo I need a new MOBO.
Now I could buy a brand new, latest release MOBO but then I would have to talk my son, who is not renouned for his patience, through a complete set-up of MCE including reg hacks, 4 tuner thing etc or I could buy the same board as in the system now, all that would be required is the, physical installation of the MOBO and components, recon even my son would have the patience for that.
Unfortunately all the sites StaticIce lists as haveing my particular board either do not have them in stock or do not give their stock levels, have e-mailed a couple to ask the question but none have responded to date.
So does anyone know where I can get an ASUS M2N32 SLI Delux wireless MOBO? Or maybe think of something I have missed that could be tried?
Long story for a short question
Craig (he with ZERO WAF)
