I am going nuts! System instability galore!

[MCorey]

I bought a new PSU and hard drive.

I set up two IBM drives with RAID and installed WinXP.

Worked fine pretty much, but the next day the machine wouldn't boot with an error saying the "system" file was corrupt or gone.

I reinstalled XP - more flake city.

I ditched XP and re-installed WindowsME and used 18" cables on the drives to help raid stability.

Crashy Galore.

Nothing predictable, just flakiness - some crashes, some blue-screens, XP had lost my user data or would BSOD.

All my BIOS's are flashed and my drivers up-to-date.

OK, let's start narrowing this down.

Screw RAID, back to my regular Promise ATA-100 card.

Reformat my two 60gig IBM drives.

Let's try XP again.

Gurgle - it goes ok one night - wake up the next day, no boot with that same "can't access "system" file message.

Come back later in the day...it boots! No reason...but into the evening I start getting random stop errors.

Alrighty-then.

Re-format. Let's try Windows2KPro. Same deal - stop errors and flaky behavior.

Swap out the power supplies...same deal...flash to a newer MoBo BIOS...no help. Remove entire motherboard to make sure all stand-off screws are aligned properly, dust everything, make sure all cables are tight. I've tried installing some or none of the MoBo driver updates.

No help!!

This evening I have done one more re-format and re-install of XP (maybe my fifth time or so of this OS alone!) so I can at least get online and search for tech help - no doubt by tomorrow morning the machine won't boot again, if it even lasts that long.

This last time I noticed that, unlike the other three(!) hard-drives in the system, the physical disk that I'm booting from doesn't have an 8 meg unpartitioned sector on it. I wonder if that may have something to do with it? I've tried narrowing down every other variable in the system.

IBM's drive-check utility says there's nothing wrong with the drive, but what does that mean, I'm running low on possibilities.

Any and all advice, questions, etc... welcome!

Total system specs:

Epox 8K7A Motherboard (AMD 761, Via 686) - good rep for stability
AMD 1.4gig Processor
Enermax 430watt PSU
Promise Ultra 100 controller into which are plugged:
60 gig IBM 60gxp Master
30 gig IBM 75gxp Slave
60 gig IBM 60gxp Master
12 gig Quantum Bigfoot slave
(Both 60gig drives are new - one a replacement for a failed drive, one a new one to try running RAID)
Plugged into MoBo IDE: Plextor CD-R/W, Zip-250, Pioneer DVD-ROM
MS Intellimouse USB
Logitech Gamepad and Joystick, both USB
HP Deskjet USB
Elsa GeForce2 32meg Graphics
Hollywood+DVD Decoder Card
SB Live Value
Nic Card

This system was stable under Win2k and ME in the past, until my recent hardware changes of the two IBM drives and the PSU(which I did swap out to check).

"Flakiness" above can mean blue-screens on boot, or during running - sometimes revoerable, sometimes degenerating into unbootability requiring a re-install, losing user account data,
USB device doesn't respond, disk files inaccessable...flakiness.

Sigh...What do you think? :frown:

 

[Skyhack]

Don't know if this will help, but the only time I've ever had data lost like that was when my HD was over heating...Are they getting a good air flow?

 

[MCorey]

Sorry, meant to put that into system specs. 4 case fans and a nice, big case. One fan blows directly over two of the drives (including the primary).

 

[Skyhack]

Well, it still sounds like the HDs to me...I think I might try running the primary by itself for just a few days to see if it was stabe, then add the drives one by one til you get to the heart of the problem. With 7200 RPM drives it doesn't take long for them to heat up...Good luck...

 

[MCorey]

Thanks. Of course the other drives aren't really getting any use yet. As for heat, what makes me thing now that it's not that is that the machine will run fine during the evening, but then won't want to boot on start-up after a night of rest.