Cannot bootup from cdrom-drive or from harddisks

Question

This is quite a post, main point is: I cannot succesfully bootup my desktop from either a cdrom or my hard disks after a normal reboot. After a cold reboot (power off for about 30-40 seconds) it will bootup but will randomly reset or freeze up.
It started with me browsing a website with chromium-svn, chromium told me that the website might contain malware, but I wasn't really worried since I was using linux and browsing under a normal user account. Then a java window popped up, something concerning settings, and my system became very slow. I tried to click away the java window but my X server crashed and put me back into KDM. I fired up a console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and did "ps aux" to see if my system was compromised and strange processes were running. That wasn't the case, but as soon as I logged out the terminal disabled itself claiming it had too much input or something like that (it's a couple of days ago I don't remember the details). So I resetted my desktop and now grub wouldn't start up. It just gave a strange character in the top left corner and froze up. A cold reboot did give me grub back, but it wouldn't let me into linux, somehow my partitions wouldn't mount. After that I tried my windows XP dual boot, that worked althrough it suffered from random resets.
Thinking something was wrong with my harddisk I tried rebooting with Parted Magic livecd. That failed, as did rebooting with the official arch livecd and with several other livecds. All giving some fault that they couldn't find/mount the cdrom, while the innitial bootup from the cdroms all went good. A cold reboot fixed that problem, but all suffered from random resets and lock-ups.
After that I thought is was a hardware component, so I tried pulling them out one by one to see what the problem might be. It wasn't the harddisk, for I nuked the partition table and pulled it ou (I have two harddisks, so pulling one out is a possibility). I also replaced the cdrom drive. Then I pulled out a new memory module (I bought one a few weeks ago) to see if that was the problem, but it wasn't. I also updated the BIOS to see if the problem was there, but to no avail. As a last ditch effort I replaced the CMOS battery and resetted the BIOS properly. But all had no effect.
I runned Memtest, but it detected no errors. Currently I have no idea what is wrong other than that it is broken. By process of elimination I'm fairly confident that it isn't the harddisk, nor the cdrom-drive nor the memory.
During the bootup from the archlinux install cd the kernel messages do indicate that it detects sda as a harddisk and sdb as a cdrom drive, while I have 2 harddisks and one cdrom drive. So it should detect sda and sdb as harddisks and sdc as a cdrom drive. Also it gives the following error:
waiting for boot device
error: boot device didn't show up after 30 seconds
And also:
usb 2-2: device description read/64, error -71
and much more of that with errors: -110, 1790, -22
Also this:
hub 5-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 2
My hyphothesis is that my southbridge (which deals with the cdrom, harddisk drives and the usb devices) is somehow broken.
I'd like to have your oppinion on this, or at least confirm if my cdrom, harddisk etc. really aren't culpable in this problem so I might reuse them. Right now my solution would be to buy a new motherboard/CPU/memory and reuse all the other components.
EDIT: My hardware is:
CPU: AMD Athlon64 3500+
Motherboard: Asus A8V-E SE (Northbridge: VIA K8T890 | Southbridge: VIA VT8237R )
Memory: 2 GB
HDD: 2x SATA-150
CDROM: DVD-writer
System ran ok from 2006
Last edited by Chromoris (2009-12-17 04:38:06)

Answer 1

Well your testing and conclusion seem correct, but maybe before buying new stuff, try booting those drives using a different machine, if there are no problems... then go ahead and get the new board.
Testing the drives with a different machine will need to wait untill after the holidays. However the disks are not that old, one is almost brand new, and nothing has given me an indication that something is wrong with the disks itself. So I think it is a safe assumption that the disks themselves are good, but it won't hurt to check I guess.
Remove the hard drives (or at least their cables) and boot a Live Linux CD from the CDROM drive. Same issues? If yes, and you have checked memtest as you said then either you have a motherboard or CPU fault. At that point remove your CPU and renew the heat sink compound and reseat the CPU. If that does not work probably a motherboard fault as you suspect.
Removed the cables and booted with a Live CD, problem remained. Althrough this time I've been rewarded with a kernel panic, still couldn't find the booted cdrom device. I renewed the heat sink compound a few months ago so I'm fairly confident it is still good. I did that because my CPU overheated, and I've kept a good eye on the temperature sensors ever since. Besides I know what happens if my CPU overheats so I'm pretty sure it is not overheating. Should the problem be a broken CPU, well that would almost be the same as a broken motherboard and I would have to replace both of them. I cannot easely find replacement parts for either the cpu or the motherboard, socket 939 has become obsolete.