Strange problem: Seagate HDD on Gigabyte DQ6 MB

[Syzzi]

Hope someone can help with this:

I've just put together a new E6600 based machine, however the hard drive is having a weird problem (a Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA2 drive on a Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6):

About 50% of the time when the PC boots or restarts from Windows and the AHCI bios on the ICH8R southbridge detects the drive (connected to channel 0), it will take a little too long to find it and once it has, instead of booting I get:

"There was a disk read error.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to reboot".

So I do and when it reboots it finds the disk without a problem and boots into Windows. It never fails twice in a row and once it's got past that problem it works perfectly.

The regularity and pattern of this problem are bizarre. I'm holding off installing everything in case someone says the drive is screwed, but equally I don't want to RMA the drive if it's a motherboard problem.

Any ideas gratfully received!

 

[alzan]

Just glancing at the manual for that motherboard and your description, it sounds like it might be a driver issue. Did you install the proper drivers for the motherboard? If so and it's still not working correctly, see if there are updated drivers for it off Gigabytes' website. You could also check for issues with the chipset and drivers on Intel's site.

Also, it wouldn't take long to run Seagates Disk Utilitys against your drive and make sure it really is good.

alzan

 

[Syzzi]

Having done some more testing it gets even weirder:

The disk read error only happens after a reboot and only ever once (press Ctrl+Alt+Del and it'll re-try successfully). From cold it boots up fine.

There's a little counter in the top right corner of the AHCI bios screen (the one after the post screen) which, on a successful boot moves from 10 to 23 then 16 and detects the drive. When the disk read error will occur it waits about 3 seconds on 23 before detecting the drive. During this time the hard drive activity light in flasshing so it seems to be doing something.

To complicate things further I ran the Seatools. The drive passed 5 quick tests (I'll do a full test tomorrow while I'm out), didn't test SMART as I couldn't see how, but failed the file system test saying "One or more errors occurred in the Index". So as it suggested I defragged and ran a full Chkdsk, which reported the indexes were fine and also everything else was good too.

Nevertheless because the Seatools said there was a problem I completely reinstalled XP. Deleted the existing partition and did a full NTFS format, the works. But nothing has changed. The Seatools still fail the file system test although Windows seems to work perfectly.

Unfortunately there's no new bios updates and I installed XP the second time with the latest AHCI drivers.

So I'm still confused!

 

[Syzzi]

To complicate things even further, I've found (and tested 10 times - 5 times doing it, 5 times not) that if I gun any key on the keyboard during the AHCI bios screen that stops the disk read error occuring when it usually would have done on a reboot.

EDIT: Also, this reboot problem only occurs with the ICH8R's AHCI bios. If I use it as an IDE drive, it reboots fine.