Storage Solutions HDD Woes or What ???

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Freaky

Freaky

Galvanizer
Well, am getting tired of runing behind the probs in my comp of late. First, my HDD died abt a week back and even now with the new replaced HDD, am having a real bad time.

This is the rundown on what happened and what is happening now :

My HDD stopped working a week back. But 10 days before it died, I had a funny issue. My BenQ would often "disappear" while working on the comp. I would have to restart before the drive would be recognized again.
Now, with the new HDD, this is happening to the HDD itself !!! :@ That too, especially when playing a game. My comp suddenly restarts and upon rebooting, the HDD is not recognized. I'll have to restart the comp again for it to be recognized. Am at a loss now.
This is what am gonna try. Have asked Saiyan to use my HDD and the IDE cable and use it as the primary disk to check if the problem persists. Have tried changing the IDE cable as also the molex connectors.
Any other suggestions are welcome and NEEDED too :(
 
Hey Freaky... the problem with the HDD might be due to the IDE cables... i had this prob a month back... suddenly the sys wud freeze and then upon restarting HDD wudnt be recogonised.. upon changing the IDE cables and cleaning the IDE ports in the mobo solved the problem for me....

try changing the IDE cable and if u keep the cabinet open often clean the IDE port for dust...

and abt dvd drive disappearing... does it happen when u are reading some cd/dvd?? or especially when u read a bit of scratched discs?? if that is the case it might mean that the drive must be in its last phase... i had this problem with my old cd drive and often it wud disappear and on restarting it wud come... finally after getting the dvd writer the problem dint come at all...
 
Blade_Runner said:
Installed a starforce protected game recently ?
Click to expand...
Yeah Blade he installed Brothers in Arms 2 yesterday, but he said the problem arised even before installing the game, his brother was watching a Movie at that time.
 
Freaky, check in bios for a setting called Hard Disk Pre-Delay or Delay For HDD's, check if its disabled or zero - if yes - try to set delay to atleast 5 secs or longer and try.

Also look into what Trajan has suggested about ide cable.

Adrian said:
Hard Disk Pre-Delay

Common Options : Disabled, 3 Seconds, 6 Seconds, 9 Seconds, 12 Seconds, 15 Seconds, 21 Seconds, 30 Seconds

Quick Review

Motherboards are capable of booting up much faster these days. Therefore, initialization of IDE devices now take place much earlier. Unfortunately, this also means that some older IDE drives will not be able to spin up in time to be initialized! When this happens, the BIOS will not be able to detect that IDE drive and the drive will not be accessible even though it is actually running just fine.

This is where the Hard Disk Pre-Delay BIOS feature comes in. It allows you to force the BIOS to delay the initialization of IDE devices for up to 30 seconds. The delay allows your IDE devices more time to spin up before the BIOS initializes them.

If you do not use old IDE drives and the BIOS has no problem initializing your IDE devices, it is recommended that you disable this BIOS feature for the shortest possible booting time. Most IDE devices manufactured in the last few years will have no problem spinning up in time for initialization.

But if one or more of your IDE devices fail to initialize during the boot up process, start with a delay of 3 Seconds. If that doesn't help, gradually increase the delay until all your IDE devices initialize properly during the boot up process.
Click to expand...
 
Saiyan said:
Yeah Blade he installed Brothers in Arms 2 yesterday, but he said the problem arised even before installing the game, his brother was watching a Movie at that time.
Click to expand...
Hmm incase he did install a sf protected game before unknowingly such as pop:ttt, the issue at hand could very well be related to it. Remove starforce using the removal tools and check if the problem persists. Also try out what dip and trajan posted.
 
Well, the problem seems to have been caused by the most unlikely culprit. One of the wires in the PCI-E connector ( 6800GT ) had come off from the plug. Fixed it after which haven't had any problems for now ( Touchwood ! )
 
oooo gotta chk for lose wires in my cabby too..

btw.. if the hard disk has bad sectorswhat exactly happens .. with the whole comp?? it hangs etc etc . pls enlighten me.. on this one.
 
Hmmm... Sorry if am worng in digging this old thread of mine but since its a related issue, I've deceided to continue here.
Well, the devil's got into my rig. Same probs again for the past 2 days. Am playing Settlers V and within 5-10 mins into the game, it would freeze and the comp would restart automatically and the HDD would not be detected in the BIOS. The only way I can now get the HDD recognized after this is to shut the comp down and start it again. Mere restart after getting into the BIOS does no good :@. I've tried changing cables and checked for any StarForce drivers too - No change in the situation.

Ran SeaTools today morning and it went through the Quick and Full Tests easily. But the File System Test failed big time. The result of the File System test shows Critical File System Errors on all partitions :@ .Am at a loss now. What could cause this ??? This is happening to the replaced HDD now which is just a month or so old.

Also, just before the HDD started dissappearing, the earlier problem of the BenQ disappearing also happened. That's stopped now but the HDD problem has resurfaced. Am not sure what to blame here - the HDD or the IDE channels on the MOBO or the nVidia IDE Controller itself :huh:
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
^^ Backup your data, and run some intensive file copying process for around 8-10 hours, maybe vid encoding or something which stresses out your HDD.

See what the condition is then, else get the drive replaced again.

I got my drive replaced twice, and now its perfect (touch wood!)
 
Will try that Anish. Also will try to find if there is anything logged in the eventviewer Chaos.

Another strange thing is that this happened after I cleaned my rig 2 or 3 days back. Same happened last time too. I tried to run Check Disc yesterday and it gave a file system error in Drive C - My Primary Partition. Have installed Win XP again today. Will have to check later tonoight what Check Disc gives me.
Thx for all the suggestions.
 
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