Hard drive and memory weirdness

[Nazgvl]

Ok, i didnt see any mention of this on the main faq threads, so here goes.

Ive got two pcs atm, both of which are giving me harddrive issues this past two weeks.

The first one

core2duo e8400
4 gigs ocz ddr2 800 (formerly 2 gigs)
evga 780i motherboard
pair of 7800 gtx in sli
wd raptor 74 gig (primary OS drive)
seagate barracuda 400 gig
audigy 4
winxp pro sp3

On this machine the raptor up and died out of the blue. Turned the machine off in the morning with everything fine, come home from work to a disk read error at bootup and a bricked pc. Whatever happened, it up and destroyed the partition and everything on it, as when i replaced it yesterday (with a 320 gig seagate barracuda) i plugged it in as a third drive hoping it was just the boot sector that was fubared and not everything, so that i could save some of my files, only to find it listed as 70 gigs roundabouts of raw unpartitioned space. Now my question is is this normal? What could cause a partition to just self destruct overnight like that, and not even with the machine turned on?

Also while on the topic of this pc, as i mentioned earlier when i replace the toasted drive , i also uppped the memory to 4 gigs from 2. Now i know i wont see all 4 gigs due to it being 32 bit xp, but shouldnt i see at least 3-3.5 gigs of it? Cause right now its only listing 2.5 gigs. I know the memory works as its all getting detected on bootup in the bios. Is there anything i can do?

Now on to the second pc.

core2duo e8400
8 gigs ocz ddr 2 800
evga 780i
pair of 8800gt in sli
wd raptorx 150 gig (primary os drive)
seagate barracuda 1tb
x-fi gamer
winxp 64 bit

With this machine a couple days ago i started getting "windows delayed write failure" errors referring to the secondary drive (the seagate), at which point the system would get incredibly unstable and require a hard boot to fix. Now i can still acess the files on the drive, and everything seems to work, although the transfer rate to and from that drive is flakey at best. Going anywheres from normal to dead stopped at random. The errors dont come up consistantly either. At times its happened right after bootup, other times its happened hours later. Any idea what could be causing this, and what i could do to fix it? Ie is it a physical drive problem, or just windows being stupid? I was just going to try and rma the drive (as the whole system is maybe 7 months old) but i cant get the damn seagate tools to run on the machine, it being 64bit.

Any help with these issues is greatly appreciated. I dont know where else to look.Thanks.

 

[Billb2]

You seem to have a thing for large amounts of memory.
Most memory controllers choke on what you are doing.
You usually have to play with the memory's voltage and timings to get them running stable.

A memory error could easily fubarr a HDD. I've had that happen more than once (overclocking memory) and when you look at the data with a file recovery program, it looks like an egg beater went through it.

 

[mpilchfamily]

memory won't destroy a HDD but if there are memory problems it will currupt files as the system tries to write them back to the drive.

Its not uncome for the Raptors to bight the dust. Especially after just a couple of yeaars or less. When you start spinning a drive faster and getting that read/write head moving faster as well you greatly increase the potential for failure.

 

[Nazgvl]

Originally posted by: Billb2
You seem to have a thing for large amounts of memory.
Most memory controllers choke on what you are doing.
You usually have to play with the memory's voltage and timings to get them running stable.

A memory error could easily fubarr a HDD. I've had that happen more than once (overclocking memory) and when you look at the data with a file recovery program, it looks like an egg beater went through it.

Ok, but everything is running at stock speeds, so why would i need to mess with the voltage and timings of the memory past what everything defaults to in bios? Besides, if that were my problem wouldnt it have manifested right away rather then way down the line?

Anyways at this point my main problem is the delayed write errors and what to do about them. As as of this morning i got one on the first pc as well ( i wasnt at the pc when it happened, so i dont know what hd it referred to). Been reading up on what can cause them, and one mention was memory parity issues. Could that be why im not seeing more then 2.5 of the 4 gigs of ram i have installed (rather then the 3 or 3.5 i /should/ be seeing?)

As for the second pc, nothing has been changed on there in the 8 months its been operational, save for the external usb2.0 hard drive i added a few days ago. Is it possible thats somehow the problem? From what i was reading on microsofts support site ( here ), the causes they have listed sound like they would have manifested right away when i first built it. Ive not changed the nforce (and its resultant hd drivers) in at least a few months on there, so its not a drivers thing (unless they can randomly corrupt?).

Im at a loss as to what to do with this, especially now that its happeneing on both systems. Anyone have experience in this?

 

[Nazgvl]

Just realised something. both machines each have a 750gig external wd mybook usb 2.0 hard drive attached for storage. Now ive had one attached to the first machine for years without issue, but until the other day when i had to replace the primary hard drive (the dead raptor) and reinstall windows, it had been running an older set of nforce drivers and had no issues. But it now using up to date drivers and having the delayed write problem. Which could explain why the problem first appeared on the second machine (which has newer drivers), as the external was added maybe a day and a half before this problem showed up, the exact ammount of time thats passed since i got this (the first machine) up and running and its first delayed write failure.

Alternatively, prior to replacing the drive on the first machine, it had been running 2gigs of memory, that i upped to 4 when i did the swap. Everything was more or less fine on here when i had 2 gigs (no write failures) but has since manifested since the switch to 4. As well the second pc has always had 8gigs of memory, but no issue until i added the external drive. So is it possible that issues arise with the delayed write errors with pcs that have more then 2 gigs of ram and the external hard drives? Even though in at least one of the cases, the delayed write failure doesnt refer to the external, but rather one of the internal hard drives?



*edit*

Just tried the regedit solution listed on the ms support page, set on the first machine without any issues sofar. When i went to do it on the second machine i was met by chkdsk on booting telling me it needed to check the drive that was having the issues for consistancy. So i let it start, only to have it freeze up right after starting the second set (i assume freezeup as nothing happened for 20 minutes and there was no hard drive acess sounds). So i did a hard reset and right off the bat bios didnt even register that the drive was there anymore and booted into windows normally without it. Did the regedit while i was there in windows and shut down followed by unplugging the pc for a minute and rebooting. Drive gets detected again and goes right into the chkdsk deal again. This time it finds some error in the indexing (step 2) and the drive starts making noise id never heard before. Not your average hd acess rumbling, but a higher ptiched version that almost sounded like scratching or clicking. Its since apparently froze up again in step 2 as i dont hear anything going on and its not done anything in the last 15 minutes. So at this point should i assume the drives toast or what?

*edit*

 

[VirtualLarry]

You should have copied everything important off of that drive as soon as you started getting "delayed write failure" messages. Those are a sign that the drive may be dying. If it's starting to freeze up and make strange noises during chkdsk, then it is definately about dead. Good luck.

 

[Nazgvl]

Yeah i have backups of everything of importance on that drive, just wanted confirmation that i should be looking at a replacement rather then some sort of software fix, guess that answers that :/

On a side note, ive noticed something strange with the first of the two pcs. Namely in that it sounds as if one of the two drives is running nonstop. Like, i can hear the acess noise albiet faintly at times. Ran the seagate seatools software to make sure the drives were both working alright, and although both drives passed all three tests (SMART, short self test, long self test) the secondary drive (the older 400 gig seagate) took much longer to complete them then the primary drive did, despite them both being very similar in volume. Which makes me think theres an issue with that drive now as well. Would explain why performance of any software run from there has beeen somewhat shakey. Any idea what could be causing this sort of constant accessing, and how to stop it? ie would a format do it? And do i have to worry about this drive self destructing now with the constant use?

I swear, in the 10 years ive been building my own pcs, ive /NEVER/ had so many problems all at once. Its really getting ridiculous now.

Thanks for the help guys.

*edit*
I also noticed an abnormal ammount of system cacheing on here. Right now sitting at over a gig in system cache, almost half of the ammount of total system memory thats getting detected (showing 2.5gig). Considering that ive not done much on here save surf tech forums for help, that seems a bit much. Any ideas?
*edit*