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help: hard drive corrupts on cold boot only

H

her34

Senior member
problem is that when i shut down my pc at night and turn on again in morning, my hard drive gets corrupted. windows will boot to desktop, but become unable to open the first app i try, heavy hdd access ensues, pc reboots, scandisk fixes errors, everything then works fine. sometimes i leave on for a few days, and when i do
reboot while computer already on, everything is fine. problem only seems to happens from a cold boot.

the odd thing is that i rma'd the hdd, reinstalled fresh on the new drive and started getting same error. so i'm not sure if there's just been a bad batch of hdd, or something in my system is causing the problem.

i ran memtest overnight and got 0 errors. i switched out ide cable, but happened again. how can i figure out what the problem is? can it be some software issue? what else should i test, before rma for another hdd

system: win xp, a64 3200+, dfi nf3 250gb mobo, antec 430true, wd 120gb hdd, nec 3500, 2x256mb crucial ram. everything always run at stock speed.
 
bad IDE driver or IDE on mobo is messed up or bad powersupply check your voltages with a volt meter
 
Double check your voltages, I know it's an Antec but they've had their share of bad power supplies as well.

Try the other IDE connector?
 
3.3v: 3.25
5v: 4.75 avg (4.69 low)
12v: 12.01


also windows closes for shut down, the same way it closes for reboot right? i'm asking because i'm wondering if there's a problem with how windows closes a program.
 
Originally posted by: Anubis
bad IDE driver or IDE on mobo is messed up or bad powersupply check your voltages with a volt meter
Click to expand...


this is recent problem, everything was stable for 3 months before. can ide on mobo go bad over time?



and i checked voltage with speedfan. i don't have a volt meter. you get +-10% range don't you? does hdd use 5v line
 
Sounds like pretty-standard OS cache-flush bugs to me. What OS are you running, and do you have it configured to automatically shut down the power ("ATX soft-off") when you shut down Windows? That's one of the first things that I disable during installation, along with dodgy power-management settings, and I tell the OS to clear the pagefile on shutdown, thus adding a delay and also flushing out anything else to the HD. You said that you ran Memtest, was that the original one, or Memtest86+? I'd try the latter, and as an added measure, Prime95 for 24 hours too. (Make sure that you aren't running ATI cats past 4.9 though, they interfere with the proper operation of Prime95 for some odd reason.)

Hmm, the possibility of the 5v line being too low, and causing HD corruption, could be an issue too. Definately try swapping a better PSU in there and see if the readings on the 5v line improve.

There are a number of post SP1 hotfixes for WinXP dealing with proper disk-cache flushing, that were also supposedly included in XP SP2. I would make sure that you have either the post-SP1 hotfix or SP2 installed.

 
Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Sounds like pretty-standard OS cache-flush bugs to me. What OS are you running, and do you have it configured to automatically shut down the power ("ATX soft-off") when you shut down Windows? That's one of the first things that I disable during installation, along with dodgy power-management settings, and I tell the OS to clear the pagefile on shutdown, thus adding a delay and also flushing out anything else to the HD. You said that you ran Memtest, was that the original one, or Memtest86+? I'd try the latter, and as an added measure, Prime95 for 24 hours too. (Make sure that you aren't running ATI cats past 4.9 though, they interfere with the proper operation of Prime95 for some odd reason.)

Hmm, the possibility of the 5v line being too low, and causing HD corruption, could be an issue too. Definately try swapping a better PSU in there and see if the readings on the 5v line improve.

There are a number of post SP1 hotfixes for WinXP dealing with proper disk-cache flushing, that were also supposedly included in XP SP2. I would make sure that you have either the post-SP1 hotfix or SP2 installed.
Click to expand...


i'm running winxp pro sp2

i did run memtest+


what's the "ATX soft-off" you speak of? where's the setting? bios?
 
Originally posted by: Anubis
bad IDE driver or IDE on mobo is messed up or bad powersupply check your voltages with a volt meter
Click to expand...

how do i check if ide driver or ide on mobo is messed up?
 
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