Safe Speed Forums

Out the bloody window...aarghhh.

Built my current PC just over a year ago with a spanking new Maxtor SATA HDD and two IDE devices as well.
Couple of months ago the SATA drive went belly up, PC refused to boot if the drive was even in the same room as it
So I had to fork out for a new one. Now that too is playing up; BSOD errors, running chkdsk each boot, freezing after login screen (but OK after a couple of reboots ).
Its now running absolutely bare, just the video card, CDROM, floppy and HDD and still giving me the bird. Can't figure out what the hell is wrong, PSU rails all seem OK, have swapped out the RAM sticks, no difference. Clean install of Win XP, still arsing around.
Whats next anyone? Mobo? SATA Cable?

Oh dear, think I'll have to take my PC to the hostipal.
Its very poorly.
Cya 'til I get it fixed.

Rp - had similar probs with my home brew mb = asrock k7s8x r3 and 80gb maxtor diamond max -not run as sata though would not install xp prof - upped bios ok at 2.6- problem maxtor 7200 getting too hot - ended up with in and out fan + using case as heatsink.Intermwediate prob - ocasionally no boot - looks like hdd not getting seek info - new ide sorted that out - maxtor have a new version of powermax and an excellent helpdesk- gets rid of probs on hdd.
Hope of some use.

That's because you didn't install the disk controller drivers when prompted at the beginning of Windows setup.

As for Maxtor drives, the current crop have known issues and the failure rate is quite high (> 30%).

@Rigpig,
If you are still getting errors then the only thing left is the video card, followed by the mobo.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

If you'd posted this a couple of years ago, and if you'd said you were using one of a number of Abit motherboards, I'd have suggested looking at that first - the problems you describe sound exactly like the ones I was having with my old KT7 mobo due to dodgy capacitors in the power supply circuitry causing the mobo power rails to fluctuate like crazy under load.

Then again, even if the mobo power circuitry is as solid as a rock, it can't do anything if the PSU is delivering poor quality power - did you check the power rail stability on that with the system under load? Some PSUs give nice steady in-spec voltages provided they're not having to deliver too much current, but load them up and things start to look decidedly crap. If you're running a power hungry CPU or graphics card (i.e. most of them these days...) along with all those drives, then things may be getting a touch marginal at peak loading.

Just to rule out the SATA controller/cable/drive, do you have a spare IDE hard drive knocking around you could use as a boot drive? Or failing that, get hold of one of those run-from-CD Linux distributions (they tend to crop up quite regularly on magazine coverdiscs), boot from that, and see how stable the system is then.

And as a wild stab in the dark, if all else fails, suggestion, you might as well double-check all your BIOS settings just to make sure they're all still within spec.

Tell me about it!!! I had two maxtor drives in two different computers both crashed.
I managed to retrieve the data from one and then re-formatted it, but the other had to go back to Maxtor for replacement - and what a palaver that was!
They do have a web page where you can download a diagnostic floppy/CD boot disk which is fairly helpfull!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

OK fingers crossed.

Back up and running with a bare bones system, cheapo graphics card and SATA drive with just one 20GB partition.
Going to see how it goes from here, will add a couple of partitions to the drive, install some games and apps and wait for the thing to crash and burn.

Twister, thanks for that suggestion re the IDE drive. It was my next step, trouble is..if it works, how do I know if the fault lies with the SATA drive or the MOBO? I can't test the SATA drive with Powermax, it doest interrogate the SATA channel

Assuming no spare SATA drives lying around, and no way to beg/borrow/steal one for testing purposes, I guess the cheapest option would be to buy a parallel-serial converter (e.g. Abit Serillel), use that to turn a spare IDE drive into a SATA-look-alike, and test the mobo side of things that way.




Are you using a SATA RAID interface, or a nForce 3/4 mobo? If not then Powermax should be able to access SATA drives (according to the documentation for v4.21 on the Maxtor website). If you are, then perhaps as a slightly more expensive alternative to the SATA adapter above, you could get a SATA PCI card and see if your existing drive is any happier on that? If you get it from a store with a *cough* generous returns policy *cough*, you may even be able to run the test for free...


...not that I'd ever condone the misuse of store goodwill in this manner, you understand, although if the store in question happens to be a particularly large chain of computer systems/accessories suppliers who seem happy enough to slap hefty mark-ups on almost everything they sell, then you could just see it as payback

I hope you are not thinking of World of PC, famous ally of Sixons?

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Hell NO!

Hmm,

Its all back together again and working with the sole exception of the Gforce 5900; I've stuck a cheapo GF4 in for the time being.

Bloody thing was running CHKDSK at each bootup as well. That was fixed by updating the Hewlett Packard drivers, jeez you wouldn't have believed the flamin' printer would cause such a headache

Going to leave it a couple of days then stick the GF 5900 back in, if it then goes belly I'll hopefully have my culprit.

I usually just threaten to launch it into the nearest river and it behaves itself for a couple of days. .

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Damn the whole thing to hell, it just crashed again with a blue screen STOP error.
The SATA HDD is awfully hot to touch, but with the two IDE drives disconnected its running fine again. Think I may be closing in on the culprit, when I find out which drive is causing the problems its in for such a thrashing............

Give it my sentiments as well mate.

What sort of temperature is "awfully hot" exactly?

There isn't a consumer HDD in the world whose MAXIMUM working temperature is allowed to exceed 55°C, and I can tell you for free that any HDD will start to struggle before it reaches it's recommended maximum.

I run 15,000rpm SCSI drives and their temperature right now is 32°C.
Yours should be slightly cooler than that if you have sufficient cooling and tidy wiring inside your case (especially as SATA is nowhere near as quick as SCSI).

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

DAMN HOT! If I touch the HDD case with the back of my finger it burns! How do you register the temp of your HDD?

In that case, it is reasonably safe to say that your drives are running way in excess of their recommended maximum temperature (and I do mean "way in excess" if it is actually burning you).
Not only will this lead to premature drive failure, but it is more than likely the reason for your stop errors.

How close are your 3 drives with respect to each other?
If you have them right next to each other, then it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that they are getting too hot with all 3 drives running.

Post a pic (or two) of the inside of your case and let me see the layout.


Thermal probe attached to the top of the drive and reporting back through hardware.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

Thanks Gixxer mate. It has gently sunk through my thick skull that this is a heat related problem, but I do believe I had another unrelated problem as well viz CHKDSK running at each boot; this was a HP driver issue
I DO have two drives adjacent to one another in the case, along with a third HDD, 1 DVDROM, 1 DVD Burner, an Arctic fan on the CPU, a chipset fan and a GF5900 graphics card with a heatsink and two fans to itself!
I'm going to try repositioning the drives, getting a HDD cooling device and a case fan - one that sits under the graphics card and blows out of the expansion slots in the rear.
Thats the cheapo option at the moment, ultimately I reckon I may have to get a better case with more circulation, but we'll see.
Cheers

Try this - a temperature monitoring prog called speedfan.
Edit to add link
http://downloads.zdnet.co.uk/0,39025604 ... 74s,00.htm

As a temp measure one of kids was playing with the idea of funneling cooling to needed areas using plastic sheet - it did actualy drop his temps.
Suggeste sites for info are those to do with overclocking - they seem to have some good ideas on how to get rid of heat as they generate a lot more.

Edit for another idea - old psu fans front and rear, place hottest drive on case at bottom - this cured my maxtor overheat prob using case as giant heatsink.

One for the truly desperate, this. When we had that heatwave the summer before last the cooling on our PC at the time was really struggling to cope, so I ended up taking the side panel off and pointing a desk fan at it. Solved the cooling problem until I got round to buying an extra case fan, and had the side benefit of me finding out how much dust and cat hair had got inside and giving it a much needed clean out. Also, if you're stuck for places to put case fans as I was with our last PC (not a very good case in that respect) you could get one of those fans that fit into a spare 5.25 bay. Ours has a pair of 1"ish diameter fans which we put in the lowest spare 5.25 slot just above the floppy and HDDs.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein