New
#1
Tech input needed please
My system should be listed in my profile if there are questions about my hardware.
This is a 5 year old system that keeps rocking and playing all the latest games which is good since I cannot afford a new build now but I have had some issues lately and want to see if the opinion I have that the motherboard is failing sounds about right to you guys.
I will describe my issues and what I did and then what ELSE happened lol.
I have 3 hard drives- 1 system, 1 storage, and 1 for system image backup. My system drive is about 1.5-2 years old and the other two are 5 years old and have been storage related drives for that period of time so not too much heavy use on them.
About 3 months ago my storage drive kept vanishing when PC wakes from sleep and would reappear if I rebooted. Sometimes when it woke up it would act like it had just been connected like a ram drive and asking me what I wanted to do with the drive (auto play menu). My anti virus also asked it I wanted to scan it. When it did that the drive would be there, if it didn't give me the auto play menu then the drive was either there or not.
I decided to pop in a spare drive I had to see if the drive was bad causing this issue or something more sinister, even checked cabling, etc, etc. I hooked the spare drive in and rebooted and low and behold I have no video, no BIOS screen, no sound, absolutely nothing! Rechecked all connections and everything was good...I work on PC's so I know what all to check and I covered it all. I was also getting a POST beep that was 1 long 3 short which indicates video error...swapped vid cards and issue remained.
The PC was like that for 2 days and I finally totally removed the motherboard thinking I might have created or had a grounding issue that appeared with me messing around in there. Put just the basics back in to see if I could get past POST or get a different error. I also did different ram configs until finally I removed 2 sticks from the B banks and only had a vid card in the #2 PCIe slot and no more video error. Also cleared CMOS. Then all the sudden I get the BIOS screen so I set all my settings cut it off then hooked the system drive up and inserted #1 video card (SLI setup).
This time I had no video again so I removed that card and just used card #2 and got into Windows. It will run with both cards in but slot #1 produces no video and card does have power. I have swapped the cards also and they both work. This where I am now.
I was looking through the event viewer and seeing multiple HAL, Volsnap, Nvstor64, print spool, and the list goes on and on. The Nvstor64 error I have read about and I have hundreds of entries for that one happening every second for like a minute and I assume this is happening when PC wakes up. This error also was present before the vanishing hard drive problem.
My printer won't print also so I am sure it has to do with spool error.
Now my question that I already think I know the answer to is....are these signs of a failing motherboard? I mean the #1 PCIe slot will not work at all so this is an issue and in the last 2 days I have been avoiding playing games too much because I need to back up some data I think. I have my eye on a replacement motherboard identical to mine but just wanted to see if someone else thought these were signs of a mb going bad?