Speaking of bad windows habits....
So in my heavy cleaning over turkey day weekend, in which I cleaned more than did work for whatever reason, I also ended up removing the wheels off my case so I could fit it under my desk(The wheels added 4" to the overall height, I needed 2")
Well in doing so I had to drill out the pop rivets, not a big deal, I was careful and while I did nick one CD-Audio header, nothing major. If I was really worried about it I would have removed the MB first of course. At any rate I took my time cleaning out the case afterwards making sure no loose shavings to short a connection or anything.
Hook everything back up, doesn't turn on. Ok more correctly it turns on for about a half a second, and shuts back off. Not even enough time for the fan on my removeable HD cage to turn on.
After a while fiddling around with the power switch headers, I manage to at least get a beep code, 9 beeps in a row, same length, pause, repeat step one. According to all the documentation I can find on the POST error codes, this should not happen. Well after slightly more fiddling that goes back to the .5 second turn on. Really annoying. Finally I manage to get the thing to turn on, no beep code. By this time I had had to disconnect the monitors though so I shut it down and reconnected, closed it up, and turned it back on. Yea, return the the .5 second turn on.
Ok finally after discovering I had a local power switch on the motherboard that I could use for testing, I removed the Powerswitch headers and anything near it, including LEDs Reset Switch, Speaker, etc.
Still nothing good.
I start swearing profusely and clear the CMOS to be sure. Still nothing.
So I now go through removing Memory cards, first one then the other, then BOTH and still get nothing usable for diagnosis. So I start removing components one by one, hoping something might be seated poorly or whatever, still nothing. Finally disconnect the SATA and IDE cables. SUCCESS, kinda. Of course with no HD connected, it doesn't do me a lot of good. So I reconnect my SATA HD and boot into Linux again, YEA. So now the only thing disconnected is my IDE cable that has my CD/DVD Burner on it, and my Removeable HD tray that I use to swap out HDs for archival purposes or to give me a second drive for my work, usually has nothing in it though.
So at this point, I am thinking, great my IDE controller is shot on my MB. But just to make sure I hook up the IDE cable, and for whatver reason I see the BIOS splashscreen come up, and think YEA. I turn it off before it gets to booting the OS so I am not waiting, even if it only takes 30 seconds to boot I didn't feel like waiting. I wanted to close it up then and there and get on to other things.
So I close it up with everything connected, hadn't in the end changed much, but it started working for whatever reason, judging from what I could tell all the connections were very strong, never did figure out what the problem was.
Well everything works, end of story right?
Well no.
After I get everything hooked back up the way it was, change around my audio cables to get my mixer out of the loop as it had died earlier in the week(Was not a good week for me) and sit down to turn on the machine to test it. I turn it on and go grab a drink, when I get back I nearly had a heart attack. This machine that had never had anything on it but Linux, I had customized completely for linux and realtime audio, was showing the bootup splashscreen for WINDOWS 2000! It finished booting straight to the login prompt for win2k
WTF!
My wife had helped me troubleshoot, we had both seen it boot into linux with no problem. and I had shut it down, while it had some problems shutting down, I was going to tackle those later(It didn't turn all the way off), but how the heck did I get windows 2000 on it in that time frame? I know MS acts like a virus sometimes, but that was freaking ridiculous.
As it turns out, I think what happened, was I had an OLD HD I was going through looking for archival stuff on it from MANY years ago when I still used Windows for some of my audio work. That HD was still in the removeable tray. Normally this wouldn't cause any problems, except I had cleared my CMOS and with it it tried to boot to hda first instead of sda.
Another thing NOT to do to your linux box... let MS infect it
Seablade
