Frickin pooey computer...

[psiu]

Ok, need possible suggestions on what could be wrong.....computer keeps freezing, generally with the IDE activity light solid.

Here's specs on system:

A7N8X (rev 2.0) bios #1005
Athlon XP 1800
1 256 MB Crucial/1 128 MB Samsung
20 GB Maxtor hard drive (Primary IDE master)
15 GB Western Digital hard drive (Primary IDE slave)
AOpen CDRW 52x32x52 (Secondary IDE master)
HP/Philips CDRW 4x4x24 (Secondary IDE slave)
Antec Truepower 330


probably not related to problem:

TNT2 M64 graphics
Soundblaster Live
SMC 1244TX NIC

3 80mm intake fans running off fan-only connector on Antec PSU (2 front/1 side)
1 60mm thermally controlled exhaust fan(back)

Ok, problem is as stated above....got the new drive (Aopen) and installed 2 weeks ago. Did have the drive start disappearing, ended up reinstalling drivers for it. Also ended up loading the nvidia drivers during this process (which I had never done). Eventually rearranged drives (Aopen moved to secondary master), end of last week.

Also had a thunderstorm roll through last week, power went out after flickering a couple times....had shut down computer, but down know if it shut down completely before power died (surge protector came unplugged from wall in that situation, and unplugged from cable modem....but don't know if a surge got through before doing so....)
Started having complete freezes (needing a hard restart) when doing hard drive to hard drive copying. Started making backups of archives on computer (had winxp on 20 GB, programs split evenly on 20 & 15GB drives, and downloaded archives/iso's on 15 GB drive. Ended up with Mandrake 10.0 (3cds), Mandrake 9.2 (2 cds), NetBSD 1.6.2 (2 cds) plus my WinXP disc. Slowly moved everything off the 15 GB drive as it seemed the freezes only occurred when that drive was involved, and the freezes and enormous slowdowns started occuring.

(Rescued my emails....forgot to get my bookmarks off firefox before the poo hit the fan though. damn)

Decided to try and get mandrake 10 on the 15gb drive on sunday.

By the time the day was out, i had reformatted the 20 and mandrake 9.2 was on it. Could not get the 15gb to format completely.....md10 refused to, 9.2 got past formatting once, then froze. Had to put the SMC NIC card in to get internet access (with 9.2).

Monday, reformatted, reinstalled XP on the 20 gb drive, reinstalled programs, 15 gb is not formatted, started having same problems.

This morning, replace rounded cable with original flat cable for hard drives....still having....issues.

Also, having freezes with no activity going on...i.e. use computer, come back 2 hours later and IDE light is solid and computer frozen.

Couple of freezes this afternoon, losing shortcuts (like IE in the start menu, changing OE to a readme shortcut pointing at nothing, losing any and all email programs, losing Finepix Viewer, farting around with cd's (one of the drives disappeared once, then on reboot it decided that the drives were named after the discs that were in....even after they werent and there were new ones in.

In event viewer here's some of todays errors:

An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom1 during a paging operation.
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.
The device, \Device\CdRom1, has a bad block.


So............WTF? Seems to be IDE related but beats the hell out of me. (Oh, ran Memtest for full 5 hours last night....no errors.)

Cliff notes:

Freezes with different IDE cables, different drives, same motherboard....

 

[johnjkr1]

It could easily be power supply related, especially considering your power flickering episode. But I would also check the hard drives to make sure they are ok by running the full diagnostic from the drive maker.

 

[psiu]

Well, forgot to add in, switched out the Antec power supply for a no name 300 watt that I had beforehand. No difference, so I put the Antec back in. Don't have any diagnostic software....got the drives from my brother in law, one of them hadn't been used, and the other not much. They just sat around for a few years however. Guess I'll try to see to if I can find some diagnostic software before the computer freezes.

 

[johnjkr1]

the diag software is free on the drive makers website..it just makes a bootable floppy

 

[psiu]

Ok, both drives have passed extended testing with the maxtor and western digital diagnostics....

So, thus far I have memtest pass, drive diagnostics pass, ide cable swap, power supply swap....and intermittent issues.

(Of course, none since I started this thread)

Will probably try pulling the old cdrw drive out, possibly 2nd hard drive temporarily as well.

 

[psiu]

And it just did it again....browsing off-topic and checking out stuff 'bout the Pistons win....

Freeze....IDE light solid....had a tab loading with a lot of pictures. Will try narrowing drives down tomorrow....although it seems to be with all the drives involved....s I don't think it's one of them.

 

[imported_raybay]

What does it do with just one hard drive, rejumpered, and no slave. Western Digital and Maxtor do not always play nice together on certain setups.. I would also replace the 40 conductor 40 connector IDE cable with an 80 Conductor Ultra DMA ATA 133. Do NOT discount the ATI card nor the sound card. They can be the cause of all sorts of problems when they are defective.

 

[psiu]

All the IDE cables are 80 conductor. The graphics card is Nvidia-based (Albatron-made). Will be trying with just one drive this morning....the problem is that the Maxtor and WD drive have played together for a year.

Can't pinpoint when the problems started either (rrrrr), it was either after playing with the drives (visual inspection shows no pins damaged, btw), a power flickering then power outage (for 7 flippin hours!) that I MAY have had the computer shutr down and unplugged for, or the forceware drivers were installed (although this would not explain linux having trouble with that disk...unless thats a separate problem).