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HD lock up....help please!

J

jdreher

Member
Sorry, I already posted this is another forum but just realized it would be better off in here...anyway...

I just put together a new system and everything seems to be working fine...except every now and then the hard drive disk access light on the case will come on and stay on and the screen will freeze. It doesn't sound like the hard drive is trying to access anything when this happens, either. I'm running an EPoX 8KHA+, XP 1900+ w/ 512MB RAM, DVD drive, ATI AIW 8500DV, IBM 60GXP hard drive, floppy and network card...the power supply is 350W (Antec) so I don't think that should be the problem...the temperature is also holding stable around 40 C for the CPU and 30 C for the system. Any ideas what may be casuing the lock ups? Everything runs fine for about 10 minutes or so then if I do something that would be "hard disk intensive" (like load a program or try to install something) I get the problem I described above.

Any ideas? This is really annoying...

thanks.
 
What OS are your running? Do you have the latest drivers for all your stuff? Are you running UDMA onthe drive? UDMA on some boards was causing lockup and data corruption on large drives if you were using the Via Chipset.
 
I'm running windows 2000 pro. I just disabled UDMA in my BIOS, I'll see if that helps...I also just found a more up to date version of the 4in1 drivers from via which includes the IDE driver, so hopefully that will help, too. Is there anyway to run UDMA and not have it lock up? I'll give that a try with the new drivers.

Oh, and one more problem that was also sort of puzzling me...the drive that is causing me problems is advertised as a 40 gig drive, shows up in a couple utilities as haveing a 41.3 gig capacity but right now and after it has been formatted it's telling me it is has a 38 gig capacity (not free space, actual capacity) I know formatting eats up a little space, but 3 gigs?? where did that go?

thanks,
Jon
 
Hmm on your bios not correctly seeing your drive. .you might want to see if you can redetect it, and make sure your ribbon cable is in securely to the back of the HD and Motherboard. As far as the UDMA and Via chipset, the fix was a combination of Bios upgrade and Via4in1 drivers. If disabling the UDMA helps your lockup problem, then you might want to check if there is a new Bios for your motherboard.
 
oh.. and about it eating up some space on your HD, I dont know the exact numbers but if you use the entire drive as one partition you will lose a nice chunk of space, but if you were to break it up to lets say 10 gig partitions you will not lose as much. Hope that makes sense..
 
Ok, that stuff about the partitions makes sense.

I just installed the new drivers...and it seems ok.
I'm not sure what the deal is with the BIOS...it seems to be detecting the drive fine and the UDMA and other stuff for the drive was set to "Auto" in the BIOS and I just disabled UDMA for the drive (from Auto to Disabled) in the BIOS. Is that what you were thinking? I'll go check and see if there is a BIOS update available, too...
 
>I'm not sure what the deal is with the BIOS...it seems to be detecting the drive fine and the UDMA and >other stuff for the drive was set to "Auto" in the BIOS and I just disabled UDMA for the drive (from Auto >to Disabled) in the BIOS. Is that what you were thinking?


Yes putting it from auto to disable.. That should let you know if you are have a UDMA problem. If you no longer have any lockups that was prolly your problem.
 
Ok, I've got it running under "disable" now, we'll see if it ends up locking up anytime soon...
Do you know where I can find out what the latest version of the Award Modular BIOS is? I have one dated 11/02/01, version 6.00PG....if there is a newer one I assume it'll let me know how to flash update it somehow? I've never done this before...
 
Here is the link to your motherboard bios.. see if that is the same one you already have, and i believe it gives you all the instructions on what you need to do. Link
 
ok, thanks for the link...but, unfortunately I've tried going to the epox site before and just tried again with you link and I can't get there...I get the "The page cannot be displayed" message in explorer. All other website work ok, though...are you having trouble getting through to it or is the firewall I'm behind right now think it's a porn site, or something?
 
That link doesn't work for me, it must be blocked on my end somehow...
In other (bad) news, the computer locked up again with the hard drive light on, even with UDMA disabled in the BIOS. It's just such a weird problem...the computer will be fine for a bit, then it will just randomly freeze. I'm not totally sure it's the drive's fault but that disk access light being frozen makes me think it is the culprit. Anymore ideas?

thanks
 
hmmm.. well there is one more idea.. i know the IBM drives have had a few bad batches in the last year.. You might check on the IBM site to see if there is a diagnostic for a the drive, it might be a sign of the drive getting ready to fail.

Also as a side note, Do you have your memory or cpu overclocked? Also when booting up do notice any of your devices sharing IRQ's? Possibly you have something sharing irq's with your HD controller.

Do you notice a repeative pattern when the drive locks? playing music, surfing. number crunching?

other then that, I'm at a loss for now, but ill keep thinking about it :/

 
I used the IBM software to check the drive and it's reporting the drive as healthy. I'm not overclocking anything and I'm not sure if any devices are sharing IRQ's...I'm not too sure how to check that, when I start up a screen that might have that info on it flashes by, but doesn't stay on long enough for me to read anything on it. I can't really tell any pattern when it locks up, it just runs fine for awhile (especially if I'm not doing anything) then when I open a program or start doing something new on the computer it locks up.
 
I just found the IRQ's and it appears the there are four separately listed Serial Bus Controllers and a display controller all sharing the same number IRQ (11). Could this be the problem? If it is, how do I fix it?
 
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