My overclocking horror story

[Dacalo]

I have AMD64 X2 4400+ and ASUS A8N-E board. Feeling adventurous, I decided to try some overclocking Friday night, using AT's own guide.

And what a mistake it was. When I was at step two (max chip capable), my harddrive got corrupted. What's funny is this happened when I was at the lower end of spectrum, I think I only increased 5Mhz from 200Mhz.

So I reset all settings and reformatted my HD. For some reason, XP reinstall is giving me errors. Bootmgr is corrupted it says (this is all on non-OCed setting). I then try Vista, but Creative driver sucks balls and sound does not work sometimes. Then I go back to XP.

It's probably my MB that sucks but this wasted me a good 6-7 hours, not to mention all the data. I am sure MBs out lately are much more OC friendly. Anyone experience HD corruption with latest MBs (DS3, 680i)?

 

[MarcVenice]

I've read abt harddisk corruption happening when the hypertransport exeeded 1000 to much. You sure it was 5 mhz you increased your fsb with ?

 

[f4phantom2500]

Your SATA bus could have overclocked as well, be sure to use ports 3 or 4 instead of 1 or 2.

 

[aka1nas]

Are you sure that board locks the PCI bus? I had loads of trouble with the A8N-E before I swapped it out for a DFI NF4-SLI Expert.

 

[Dacalo]

Originally posted by: MarcVenice
I've read abt harddisk corruption happening when the hypertransport exeeded 1000 to much. You sure it was 5 mhz you increased your fsb with ?

Yes I am positive, I am conservative when it comes to this stuff.

Originally posted by: f4phantom2500
Your SATA bus could have overclocked as well, be sure to use ports 3 or 4 instead of 1 or 2.

You are probably right, I am such a noob. 🙁

Originally posted by: aka1nas
Are you sure that board locks the PCI bus? I had loads of trouble with the A8N-E before I swapped it out for a DFI NF4-SLI Expert.

I don't know. Guess I shouldn't have messed with before doing some research. I don't think I will be OCing until I build a new C2D rig later this year.

 

[IGBT]

..if it's not broken don't fix it.

 

[Thor86]

If you were feeling adventurous and learned something from this, then I don't think it was a wasted weekend.

 

[aigomorla]

waaaaaaaaait... this is the first time i heard about sata coruption...

Is this why you never wanted to exceed 1000mhz ht?


This is new... okey now heres another twist, doest his same rule apply to the 680i mobo?

i know there has been tons of sata issues, but is this same problem addressed in the intel boards?

 

[The Sauce]

I have max-overclocked the last 12 systems I have built dating back about 10 years and have never had a HDD corruption. I have heard about it but it never happened. I always make sure to lock the PCI bus at 33 and agp/pcie at 100 to avoid that problem. Also HDD corruption should theoretically only really be an issue if overclocking either the PCI bus or possibly the memory, but much less likely just overclocking the CPU...especially if you are going in small increments and stress testing as you go. I'm gonna say that this was possibly not related to the overclocking unless you did something wrong.

 

[Yellowbeard]

It's time consuming but, when I OC, and especially on higher memory OCs, I always boot new settings for 1 pass of Memtest. If it passes, then there is an OK shot at being OS stable enough to avoid HD corruption. If it won't pass Memtest, don't even try the OS.

 

[StormSide]

Originally posted by: Yellowbeard
It's time consuming but, when I OC, and especially on higher memory OCs, I always boot new settings for 1 pass of Memtest. If it passes, then there is an OK shot at being OS stable enough to avoid HD corruption. If it won't pass Memtest, don't even try the OS.

Ultimate Boot CD is great for that! Has a sload of utils to check mem/cpu/stability all
from the safety of your CD rom drive.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

[Yellowbeard]

Originally posted by: StormSide

Originally posted by: Yellowbeard
It's time consuming but, when I OC, and especially on higher memory OCs, I always boot new settings for 1 pass of Memtest. If it passes, then there is an OK shot at being OS stable enough to avoid HD corruption. If it won't pass Memtest, don't even try the OS.

Ultimate Boot CD is great for that! Has a sload of utils to check mem/cpu/stability all
from the safety of your CD rom drive.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

That is a really cool disk. I had forgotten about that one, good link!

 

[Thor86]

Originally posted by: Yellowbeard
It's time consuming but, when I OC, and especially on higher memory OCs, I always boot new settings for 1 pass of Memtest. If it passes, then there is an OK shot at being OS stable enough to avoid HD corruption. If it won't pass Memtest, don't even try the OS.

Exactly, bad memory settings could lead to data corruption on hddisks.

 

[dwcal]

Originally posted by: Snatchface
I have max-overclocked the last 12 systems I have built dating back about 10 years and have never had a HDD corruption. I have heard about it but it never happened. I always make sure to lock the PCI bus at 33 and agp/pcie at 100 to avoid that problem.

That's the important part. Make sure PCI, AGP/PCI-E are all locked. Don't trust the BIOS. You can run Clockgen in Windows to check the bus speeds.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Originally posted by: Thor86

Originally posted by: Yellowbeard
It's time consuming but, when I OC, and especially on higher memory OCs, I always boot new settings for 1 pass of Memtest. If it passes, then there is an OK shot at being OS stable enough to avoid HD corruption. If it won't pass Memtest, don't even try the OS.

Exactly, bad memory settings could lead to data corruption on hddisks.

Man, you don't know how many times I learned this the hard way. I used to do a LOT of XP repair installs 😱

 

[najames]

Make sure the floppy disk is enabled in the BIOS on this board too for OC. Doesn't matter if you have one or not, just set it to a 1.44. I have one with latest BIOS too.

 

[spittledip]

Clockgen only shows mem, cpu, and fsb on my pc.. Does this mean the other buses are locked?