G'day rharv,
Quote:

I had a buddy call just last night with similar problem. We found that by disconnecting a DVD drive he was able to boot up. Something must have been happening when the OS checked that drive, because it would shutdown during boot ... and once in a while when he did get booted up all the way, it would shut down as soon as he put a disk in either of the two drives using that IDE cable
Disconnecting one at a time revealed the culprit drive.


We find that a bit on desktop systems that use IDE - the optical drive gets a bit dodgy and stuffs up the bus*. It seems to that the push to manufacture optical drives a cheaply as possible has resulted in reliability problems with some manufacturers. We used to see a LOT of Sony's do this but they seem to have gotten their act together more recently. SATA devices work differently and shouldn't cause these kinds of issues.

Note that we don't normally see this happen in Notebooks...

* In an IDE based system, the AT bus is extended out to the drives via buffer circuitry. The master device actually controls I/O for both itself and the slave device so if either device has a problem that affects bus access it will prevent the other from functioning correctly.

--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya laugh --=--
You're only paranoid if you're wrong!