My computer's around 3 years old, with the following main specs:
Motherboard: Asus A8R-32MVP Deluxe
CPU: AMD Opteron 175
RAM: 2*1024MB OCZ DDR2 sticks
Vid card: Radeon X1900XTX
PSU: Seasonic 600W
Sound: Creative X-Fi.
Two DVD burners, floppy drive, that's it.
Here's the history of what's been happening. I first built my computer with two WD 250GB HDDs in a striped array, using the mobo's ULi RAID controller. This worked alright for 2-2 1/2 years, though my computer had always had some issues on booting up. Sometimes after detecting the RAID array, and starting to load Windows (Without displaying the splash screen, just a single flashing ASCII Underscore in the top-left corner of the screen), it would just sit there. Occasionally the curser would move to the second line if I waited long enough, but that was it. I'd use ctrl+alt+del to reboot at this point, and after doing this a few times, it would finally get into windows.
The other thing it would do is it would start to boot, the fans would all rev to maximum speed like they normally do, I'd hear a click or two and some whirring from my CD-ROM drives as they started to test themselves, then it would all stop, the fans would stay revved up, I'd hear the clicks, and this would keep repeating as it started to boot up, then restarted itself. The only way I could get it to stop this cycle was to eject the CD-ROM drives multiple times, and it would finally slow the fans down, get to displaying boot text, and be fine from there. It seemed to be more likely to display this behaviour if I'd left a DVD in the drive, even though the RAID array was the only boot device I listed in the BIOS.
Around 6 months ago, one of the 250GB HDDs vanished from the RAID array, essentially destroying it. I bought two Seagate 500GB HDDs and set them up in a mirrored array, and restored my old hard drive image from a Windows Home Server backup. After testing both 250GB drives, there was absolutely nothing wrong with either of them, and I put them back in as a mirrored array, and they've been fine ever since.
Since I did this, I've no longer had the issue with locking up on boot-up, but I still have the click-reboot issue, and now it will often tell me, after the ULi RAID dialog telling me it's found all the HDDs and which arrays they're in, that it can't find the boot device, and to please insert it and reboot, or hit any key to try again. I just hit space and it boots fine.
Within a couple of months of this, one of the 500GB drives disappeared from the array. I haven't tested it yet, but I strongly suspect there'll be nothing wrong with it. This morning, the other 500GB disappeared. Luckily I did a complete backup yesterday, which I followed with a defrag using PerfectDisk 8.0.
One other thing that used to happen. I used to have cold cathodes in my case, a pair of green and a pair of red. If I was ever stupid enough to turn them on or off while my computer was booting, it would absolutely shiat itself. Strange display frozen on the screen, nothing responding etc. I'd reboot and my boot devices would have vanished from BIOS, I'd have to reboot a few times for it to detect the ULi RAID arrays again so I could select them again and get it to boot normally.
My thought is that the motherboard has some serious issues, and it's time to replace it, but then I thought that maybe it's an issue with the PSU not delivering a steady voltage on startup. Just because it was one of the most highly rated at the time for stability and efficiency, doesn't mean I couldn't have received a dodgy one.
So, given the behaviour I've described, what do the learned minds here think the issue might be? If it's the mobo, I'm actually quite happy to buy a new one with a new CPU, and start building my hard drive content from scratch again, it'll get rid of a lot of crap that had built up over the years that's been slowing things down.
Keep in mind that once it's booted into Windows, I've never had any issues at all, it's the turning it on in the morning that's always filled me with dread.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Edit: I've just tried testing both my Seagate drives, by booting to a SeaTools boot CD and another computer won't even let that happen. If my drive's inserted, it seems to freeze on bootup, putting the HDD through a repeated sequence of spins and a click. If I hit F2 for setup, or F12 for a boot list, it brings up the text saying it's going to that menu, but keeps spinning my HDD and not going anywhere, even though I made sure the CD-ROM drive was the only device it would try to boot from.
Maybe it is just my hard drives that are both dead.
Motherboard: Asus A8R-32MVP Deluxe
CPU: AMD Opteron 175
RAM: 2*1024MB OCZ DDR2 sticks
Vid card: Radeon X1900XTX
PSU: Seasonic 600W
Sound: Creative X-Fi.
Two DVD burners, floppy drive, that's it.
Here's the history of what's been happening. I first built my computer with two WD 250GB HDDs in a striped array, using the mobo's ULi RAID controller. This worked alright for 2-2 1/2 years, though my computer had always had some issues on booting up. Sometimes after detecting the RAID array, and starting to load Windows (Without displaying the splash screen, just a single flashing ASCII Underscore in the top-left corner of the screen), it would just sit there. Occasionally the curser would move to the second line if I waited long enough, but that was it. I'd use ctrl+alt+del to reboot at this point, and after doing this a few times, it would finally get into windows.
The other thing it would do is it would start to boot, the fans would all rev to maximum speed like they normally do, I'd hear a click or two and some whirring from my CD-ROM drives as they started to test themselves, then it would all stop, the fans would stay revved up, I'd hear the clicks, and this would keep repeating as it started to boot up, then restarted itself. The only way I could get it to stop this cycle was to eject the CD-ROM drives multiple times, and it would finally slow the fans down, get to displaying boot text, and be fine from there. It seemed to be more likely to display this behaviour if I'd left a DVD in the drive, even though the RAID array was the only boot device I listed in the BIOS.
Around 6 months ago, one of the 250GB HDDs vanished from the RAID array, essentially destroying it. I bought two Seagate 500GB HDDs and set them up in a mirrored array, and restored my old hard drive image from a Windows Home Server backup. After testing both 250GB drives, there was absolutely nothing wrong with either of them, and I put them back in as a mirrored array, and they've been fine ever since.
Since I did this, I've no longer had the issue with locking up on boot-up, but I still have the click-reboot issue, and now it will often tell me, after the ULi RAID dialog telling me it's found all the HDDs and which arrays they're in, that it can't find the boot device, and to please insert it and reboot, or hit any key to try again. I just hit space and it boots fine.
Within a couple of months of this, one of the 500GB drives disappeared from the array. I haven't tested it yet, but I strongly suspect there'll be nothing wrong with it. This morning, the other 500GB disappeared. Luckily I did a complete backup yesterday, which I followed with a defrag using PerfectDisk 8.0.
One other thing that used to happen. I used to have cold cathodes in my case, a pair of green and a pair of red. If I was ever stupid enough to turn them on or off while my computer was booting, it would absolutely shiat itself. Strange display frozen on the screen, nothing responding etc. I'd reboot and my boot devices would have vanished from BIOS, I'd have to reboot a few times for it to detect the ULi RAID arrays again so I could select them again and get it to boot normally.
My thought is that the motherboard has some serious issues, and it's time to replace it, but then I thought that maybe it's an issue with the PSU not delivering a steady voltage on startup. Just because it was one of the most highly rated at the time for stability and efficiency, doesn't mean I couldn't have received a dodgy one.
So, given the behaviour I've described, what do the learned minds here think the issue might be? If it's the mobo, I'm actually quite happy to buy a new one with a new CPU, and start building my hard drive content from scratch again, it'll get rid of a lot of crap that had built up over the years that's been slowing things down.
Keep in mind that once it's booted into Windows, I've never had any issues at all, it's the turning it on in the morning that's always filled me with dread.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Edit: I've just tried testing both my Seagate drives, by booting to a SeaTools boot CD and another computer won't even let that happen. If my drive's inserted, it seems to freeze on bootup, putting the HDD through a repeated sequence of spins and a click. If I hit F2 for setup, or F12 for a boot list, it brings up the text saying it's going to that menu, but keeps spinning my HDD and not going anywhere, even though I made sure the CD-ROM drive was the only device it would try to boot from.
Maybe it is just my hard drives that are both dead.
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