Hard drive chat-chattering away.

[CuriousMike]

OK.
This is ridiculous.

My wifes old computer was a build I did a long time ago.
Something like a XP1700 and a basic MSI nforce mobo, along with some random 40GB harddisk.

That machine, even after a couple of scorched earth installs, always seemed to have weird harddisk issues... i.e., loading of anything took forever.

Fast forward a bit, and that machine became the basis of my daughters new rig... with the exception that I put a newer 80GB harddisk in it.

The problem persisted... even with yet *another* XP install.

OK, I figured I'd solve it once and for all when I got my new C2D mobo + CPU last summer.
I took the mobo that I was using ( a newer MSI nforce board and a Sempron 3100 that never had harddisk issues ), and put it as the basis of her machine. (Keeping the newer 80gb harddisk.)

Scorched earth re-install.

Yet the problem persists.

The machine takes long to load.

Heaven help you if you try to launch FireFox and iTunes together, even waiting 10-15 seconds after XP seems to be somewhat quiet at the desktop.

I've verified in the BIOS(es) and via XP that the harddisk is in uber-DMA mode. (PATA drive.)


The one thing that *may* have persisted throughtout all the builds is the PATA Cable.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Then replace the cable.

 

[CuriousMike]

Is it conceivable it's the cable?

i.e., what kind of issues might one see with a bad cable?

 

[mpilchfamily]

Bad cables can cause all sorts of issues. If there is a bad wire in the cable then some data can be lost and the system will try to rebuild it as its trying to pull the information. Its the ocasinal bit being lost that may be causeing the sounds. Forceing the drive to constantly seak and work harder to move the information being requested. All it takes is a single wire in that ribon cable to be cracked or brocken to cause problems. A simple brocken wire can also cause a working drive to not be sean by the system.

Its always a good idea to change out the drive cables when your changing out the drives.

 

[RebateMonger]

Yeah, I've had "known-good" IDE cables that, when handled a bit, quit working or misbehaved. A recent case was my brand-new Dell SC440 Server. I had to disconnect the IDE cable from the DVD drive to replace it with another drive. When I reconnected the IDE cable and rebooted, Windows Server 2008 didn't see a DVD drive anymore. A new IDE cable fixed the problem.

Prior to that, I couldn't get that same computer to properly recognize two IDE hard drives when connected to that same cable. One drive wasn't recognized at all and Windows Server said there was a "problem" with the other drive. At the time, I'd figured maybe the Intel drive controller was only designed for CD/DVD drives. But now, I'm thinking it was probably that "bad" IDE cable that caused me so much IDE grief a few weeks ago.

In one other act of stupidity, I accidentally attached a 40-wire IDE cable to a hard drive in my new Vista computer. Sound was stuttering and noisy, the mouse was stuttering, and everything was just slow. But it totally passed the hard drive diagnostics. There were some strange Disk-related error messages in the System Event Log that I'd never seen before.

When I finally got around to examining the IDE cable, I realized what I'd done. An 80-conductor cable instantly solved the stuttering, misbehaving audio, and other problems.

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: mpilchfamily
Its always a good idea to change out the drive cables when your changing out the drives.

+1

Even though I've never seen a cable go bad, personally, they're cheap so why not?

Also, how much RAM does that system have? If less than 1GB that could be your problem.

 

[CuriousMike]

The system has 1GB of ram.
I'll swap out the cable ( as soon as my daughter gets off the machine ) and report back the results.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[alevasseur14]

Here's another vote for the cable being bad!

The SATA cable alone is enough for me to never want to go back to a PATA... anything!

Good luck!!!

 

[CuriousMike]

I put a brand new IDE cable in.
One of the things I'm never certain of is which "end" of the cable I should attach to the harddisk.
The cable has two connectors; I use the first connector (closest to mobo), and leave the end connector empty.

This did nothing for the chattering problem.

A couple other things to note:
Windows boots very quickly to the login screen. So quickly that it makes me think that there is something happening from the login screen to the desktop that causes the problem.

The other part of this is the motherboard is an ECS NForce3-A. The previous motherboard was an NForce2, and I distinctly remember for both installs that I *never* used the nVidia "IDE" drivers. I remember reading they should not be used.
Well, as a test I just installed the latest IDE drivers from nvidia... and that made no difference.

So, I'm still back to square one... and it makes no sense.

She'll live with it for now.
:/