P4C800E-Dlx may be giving up the ghost

[Rick_EE]

It appears the onboard Ethernet has died and now I can only get it to boot by doing a CMOS reset. If I don't, it hangs on the "checking NVRAM" message.

Given the age, I am going to try changing the battery tonight, but I am not holding out hope. Anyone have any thoughts?

The next question would be about migrating to a new build. I have two PATA drives on the Promise controller in Raid 1. Would I be able to move those to a new RAID controller without losing the data? I made a backup last night, but it would be nice to not lose the setup.

Lastly, if anyone want to give advice on a replacement, I am all ears. I am a moderate gamer and do a little video editing.

[ctal]

Rick -- Yes, replacing the battery certainly sounds in order, given the age and symptom. Just on a hunch, although I realize that the hang occurs during the check of NVRAM, I'd suggest also checking your system RAM with Memtest86+.

I don't think it would be practicable or desirable to transfer your existing software installation to a new motherboard. Obviously all kinds of drivers for the chipset and other motherboard components would have to be changed, and you'd have to reactivate with Microsoft, and I suspect that that in the end you'd wind up with something that didn't perform as well as a clean install. Add to that the fact that you are on a RAID controller and I'm hard pressed to imagine all the complications.

Re a replacement, see the following threads on recent or in progress builds by me, PolonyC2, and TQ:

My New Build

new system build

My new game machine...

Regards,
-- Al

[Rick_EE]

The question about transferring was more pertinent when I could not get the board to boot. I was worried that I would not be able to access the data at all from another board. The first thing I did when I got it to boot was update my backup.

That really is the question. If you have a raid set up, what happens when the mobo dies? The redundancy is great for when a disk croaks, but are you SOL if you don't have the exact same RAID controller available?

[ctal]

Rick -- See the last post in the following thread:

Luminous Landscape Forum > Moving a RAID to a new computer

Yes, it looks like motherboard replacement will almost certainly destroy a raid setup unless either the controller on the new board is identical to the one on the old board (I found that indicated in several other threads on various forums, as well), or the controller is on a pci card which can be transferred to the new mobo.

Regards,
-- Al

[Rick_EE]

I had figured that. It is changing my thoughts on what to do with this new build. I may be better off just having two hard drives and running a batch file every night to backup my critical data. (photos and video).

I replaced the battery and even flashed the BIOS last night and it did not help.

I have been researching hardware. Unfortunately, I am so out of it when it comes to what to look for. I am leaning quad core because I want to do more video stuff, but the slow speed of my old computer made me lose patience. I read that Premier elements will use a quad core processor.

[ctal]

There is another important thing, of course, that RAID 1 (or any other RAID) doesn't protect against, and that is your software getting all messed up, by an update or by installation of new software or hardware.

My own feeling is that RAID represents a lot of complication, that in this era of big, fast, and inexpensive hard drives doesn't gain very much. I put 2 or 3 hard drives in each of my systems, all connected singly, plus an external firewire drive. I do backups of important data daily, plus every month or so I create a drive image, that I store on both an internal and external drive. Restoring the image reduces what would be a 30 hour process to reinstall all of my software from scratch to about 20 minutes.

Re dual cores/quad cores, you may have noticed in my "My New Build" thread that even though I do video editing extensively (with Sony Vegas, which can make use of 4 cores), I went with an E8400 (dual core). My feeling was that even though a quad core would do the video builds somewhat faster, the E8400 would do them vastly faster than what I've been used to (a P4C 2.8 on a P4C800 Deluxe), and for most other purposes (that I do more frequently) a dual core would be faster. I haven't yet done a video build on the new machine to see exactly how it compares to the old system, but I suspect it will be about 3 times faster. There's no one right answer to this question, of course, but that was my feeling.

Regards,
-- Al

[Rick_EE]

My current setup is 4 drives. A system drive, a drive for program files and non critical data, and two mirrored PATA drives. I moved My documents onto the Mirrored volume. As I am realizing now that even though I have the redundancy, I still have a single point of failure. The motherboard.