Please help...I've re-installed windows three times in the last three days!

[jez006]

It's not definite...but I might I have found the culprit!

I was rummaging around my case to see which fans were getting noisy (I'm thinking about changing them along with other upgrades), and I brushed the molex output going to my hard drives...I heard them stop spinning and then spin up again! I did it a second time, and the same result.

So it looks like one of the outputs on my modular psu has been causing all this grief, perhaps a loose connection. It makes sense because it's been intermittent...but on the other hand the problems disappeared after reloading windows...hmmmm.

I may be back in this thread complaining again soon...we'll see!

 

[Ketchup]

That is a VERY likely culprit from the symptoms your described. Good job!

 

[jez006]

Thanks ketchup.

I swapped the molex connection on my PSU last night to a different socket (modular PSU). No crashing/freezing last night or today so far. But the computer is hanging and pausing sometimes, even just from changing tab in firefox. I think this mess is possibly a combination of the hard drive and the PSU.

 

[jez006]

Right...computer is hanging quite frequently tonight, every few minutes or less it seems. And now I'm getting this message up in itunes when it's just playing music:

"The itunes library file cannot be saved. The disk could not be read from or written to"

Hd Tune says health is fine on all three of my drives...but it seems itunes is telling me I've got a problem with my storage drive.

I ran a quick scan using HD tune on the storage drive and it shows up fine:

Any thoughts? Itunes and HD Tune are saying conflicting things. I'm going to unplug that drive and see what happens. It could even be the power cable from the psu causing this.

 

[jez006]

I think I've fixed the problem. I changed my windows drive sata cable and mobo sata port (the ports are difficult to access so I had to just swap it to another one cable that was already plugged in). It's been running fine since then, no hanging or pausing at all. I remember a while ago I had the same issue with my cd drive sata cable. I think the sata ports/controller on my motherboard are starting to fail!