Weird Intermittent Floppy Drive Problem

Since all PS readings are high, especially the 12V, I'd suspect a faulty
supply, although I agree the asus Probe is far from foolproof. Have you
tried Motherboard Monitor instead of the Asus software? It works fine on my
Presario S5200CL which has the same Asus motherboard as yours. There is a
selection for the A7N8X-LA board in the MBM5 setup.
HH

"Nigel Parsons" wrote in message
...
Hi

Hoping someone here can give me some ideas....

I have a Compaq Presario S4700UK with A7N8X-LA motherboard and Athlon
XP 3200+ processor, Windows XP SP1

I have recently upgraded my graphics card to an ATI radeon X800 Pro
and swapped the power supply from the Lite-On 250W model to a Jeantech
450W 120mm model JN450W-120F-AP.

The system seemed to be behaving itelf fine, but now *sometimes* on a
cold boot the floppy drive makes an unusual grinding noise instead of
the quiet clicking it normally makes. Then if I attempt to access a
floppy in windows from the command prompt, it grinds for around 10
seconds, and comes back with the error "The floppy disk controller
reported an error that is not recognized by the floppy disk driver".

If I do the same from Explorer it just keeps grinding until I end the
process.

If I then reboot when the system is in this state, the same thing
happens. However if I shut down and power off at the front switch (but
there is still power to the main board), then reboot, the system will
recover.

Now normally when I power down I switch the whole computer off as well
from the power switch on the surge protection strip everything is
plugged in to. There is also a power switch on the new PSU, but I
normally leave that on as its awkward to reach. The old PSU didn't
have one.

This is the really weird bit - the problem only seems to occur when
the computer has been powered off for over 8 hours ! eg I can use it
late at night and again in the morning, and it will behave itself, but
if I come back in the evening after it has been off the whole day,
then I tend to get this problem.

My thoughts at the moment are to just give up and go back to the
original graphics card and power supply!

Because the PC is still under warranty, the motherboard and floppy
drive are scheduled to be replaced next week. I don't want to risk the
same thing happening with the new motherboard!

Any thoughts?

I did download ASUS PC Probe, and the voltages are reported as 16.32V
for the +12V line, 6.854 for the +5V line, and 4.08V for the +3.3V
line. However accuracy of this program seems to be debatable according
to the newsgroups I have looked at. Could the supply voltages be
outside of system tolerances ? The CPU fan also comes on much more
often, with more than it did before, with CPU temperature being
reported at 71 degrees.

thanks for your help

Nigel