Hard Drive Problems

[mastapenguin]

Hi there,

I've got a 6 month old PC, with 2 Seagate 7200.11 500GB drives. I'm getting an issue where it seems one drive is failing to read which sends windows into a BSOD and hot reset. When it hot resets the drive that failed the read/write is not visible in the bios. However if I do a cold reset everything works fine for a little while.

I thought the problem could be the cables, as my sata ports are somwhat covered by my 9800GTX, but I have taken out the GTX and checked the connections they seem okay.

I have already had one drive fail in the last few months, and I know HDD failures are extremely rare- so I was wondering if anyone else had any ideas?

Any help appreciated.

 

[faxon]

try putting the drive in another system and see if it has the same read errors. if it is then your drive is failing. are the drives in raid? check your raid controller maybe? have you tried using different cables? could be a bad cable, i have had that happen to me before after some caps on my board fried (see thread posted a few days ago here)

 

[Denithor]

faxon pretty much covered the spectrum there.

Also if you can check another hdd on that motherboard/cable to confirm nothing wrong. Is there a different SATA port you can plug into? Use a different cable and see if that helps.

And, before you go any further -- back up anything on that drive you don't want to lose.

 

[mastapenguin]

I have downloaded Seatools from Seagate and the problem drive (the one that doesn't show up in bios after a BSOD) passed both the short drive self test and long drive self test. Unfortunately the only other comps I have available are laptops or old desktops before sata was common... My 9800GTX blocks up the other sata ports on my mobo, so I think I will have to unplug one of my optical drives and see what happens. I'll report back with any progress.

I have noticed that if I leave my computer on unattended for a few hours and then come back it will invariably BSOD or freeze within about 5 mins of use. Could this indicate a power supply problem?

Thanks faxon and Denithor, any other thoughts?

 

[Denithor]

Go ahead and unplug your optical drive and run the hdd on that controller.

Also, run memtest86 to confirm your RAM isn't having issues (overnight run is best).

What is the BSOD code given when the system crashes?