New system build, serious hard drive corruption

[flxnimprtmscl]

So I just upgraded to:

Abit IP35-E
Intel C2D 6320
2x1gb sticks of the HP ram from the hot deals forum
Antec Earthwatts 430

On this system I've got 2 80gb WD SATA drives and one 250gb Seagate for storage.

So about 2 days ago I put the new rig together, everything boots up fine except when I get into Windows I notice that a lot of the folders in my storage drive say they're empty. The drive still shows the space as used but the folders are apparently empty. So I try some data recovery apps on the 250 gig drive as well as one of the 80 gig drives that the data was also stored on before I formated over it. I get 150 or so pictures out of 3000+ back and that's it. I reboot and chkdsk runs on my 250 gig drive, recovers all the orphaned files, and all that was shown as empty before is now back, well sort of. None of the video plays, none of the pictures are viewable, etc.

So tonight I install SP2 as well as the chipset drivers for my new board. The install of the chipset drivers gets corrupted somehow and when I reboot windows won't load. Chkdsk said the drive I was using for the OS had errors so after repairing them I reinstall. Then run the data recovery apps again to get my 150 pictures back that I was too stupid to burn to CD. So the recovery starts, I've got the pictures back, but by the time the recovery ends 10 minutes later they're gone. The directory they're in was corrupted in the space of 10 minutes. So I reboot, chkdsk runs automatically on the drive I recovered to, fixes the problem, and now they're back.

So, I'm assuming it's either the PSU or the board. Any way I can easily diagnose the problem?


*Edit* I'm just kind of seeking advice here. I was all ready to RMA the board but I'm nearing the end of the term here and I've been swamped for the last few days. However, I haven't had a single hiccup out of this thing since the initial day 1-2 problems. Any advice on this? It would be a huge PITA to RMA the board so I'd rather not if I don't have to.

 

[Cutthroat]

Either your disk is going bad, use Seagate's drive tools to check it really good, on a different PC if possible.

Or, more likely you have a bad motherboard, I had an Asus P5N32-E SLI show the same symptoms for a few days, all of a sudden the PCIe slot went bad a couple days later, started beeping at me and I had to RMA.

 

[flxnimprtmscl]

I'm having corruption problems on two disks. The one WD is a couple years old and the 250 gig Seagate is about a two weeks old. I doubt it's the disks.

 

[Cutthroat]

Originally posted by: flxnimprtmscl
I'm having corruption problems on two disks. The one WD is a couple years old and the 250 gig Seagate is about a two weeks old. I doubt it's the disks.

Yeah, I would doubt that. I'm guessing a bad motherboard, I really can't think of anything else that could cause corruption like that.

EDIT: Just an afterthought, did you use new SATA cables? Possible bad ones, one company (can't remember) release some bad cables. Maybe try some different ones.

Still betting on the motherboard though

 

[flxnimprtmscl]

Edit bump.

 

[bendixG15]

Did you do a memory test.... memtest ??

Bad memory will write crap to the HD... happened to me once, turned out to be a bad memory slot on the mobo.

 

[flxnimprtmscl]

I haven't but I can't imagine this is memory related. I mean, this was immediate, as soon as I initially booted, all data on my storage drive was corrupted even though nothing had been written to it.

Strangely enough, as I think about it, the corruption problem seems to have gone away after I was able to install the boards chipset drivers. The first time I tired there was some kind of write error, the installation (not the system) hung and when I rebooted the OS was corrupted and I had to reformat. The second time I tried the install hung in the same spot (USB controller) but there was no write error and when I rebooted everything was fine.

 

[Jaybird]

I've been having IDE corruption issues with an IP35 (non-pro) board as well. System passes all stress tests and is not running particularly hot, event logs read "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume J:." This is occurring on two separate physical disks. Sucks