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Packard Bell Legend 610 PB400 Motherboard disk controller failure

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First post, by vga256

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Hi all. I've got a PB Legend 610 486 SX-25. The NiCad battery began to leak, so I swapped it out with a NiMH battery of the same voltage and fit. The machine worked well for a few months, until it very recently began showing a "fixed disk controller failure" on boot. I've tried several different drives with the board, and all of them produce this error message regardless of the disk geometry settings in BIOS.

So I ordered a replacement board from eBay. This one arrived with battery leakage corrosion, which I cleaned up. It has *exactly the same* disk controller failure as my original board. What are the chances both boards suffer the exact same failure?

Can anyone give me some troubleshooting ideas on narrowing down what's causing the hard drive controller failure? I thought the controller is on the drive itself, not on the board?

Thanks!

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BIOS error
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battery corrosion (before)
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Last edited by vga256 on 2019-05-15, 21:30. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 11, by dionb

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"Disk controller failure" can be as simple as incorrect CHS settings (due to loss of CMOS data) or a dead/dying HDD. What happens if you attach the same drive with the same settings to a different system?

Reply 3 of 11, by vga256

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Thanks for the ideas so far. Just tested the drive (Seagate ST3120A) in my Pentium 100, and it works fine with the same CHS settings and IDE cable.

Any other ideas on figuring out the source of the controller error on my PB400 board?

Reply 4 of 11, by vga256

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Update:

A few pics of the motherboard:

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Top side of board
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IMG_3426-cmp.jpg
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Underside of board
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IMG_3427-cmp.jpg
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Battery location and corrosion
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Reply 8 of 11, by vga256

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FWIW, I sold this board to someone with better soldering skills than I - he repaired several corroded traces on the PCB due to the leaky battery. It took him days to figure out where the traces were broken.

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