Weird system problems, "Via VT8237R Plus" and WD Black 500GB

[mikeymikec]

I'm putting a new disk in a system after the old disk has died.

After Vista 32 SP1 setup, the system seemingly hung on a black screen saying "Please wait while Windows sets up your computer", so I reset it. It seemingly paused a long time again at a different point of booting into setup but I just left it to it and eventually Windows booted.

In the logs are lots of atapi controller errors pointing at the disk (I temporarily disconnected the CD drive and the problem still occurred). Vista SP2 install failed the first time but worked the second. Windows Update consistently fails on error C80003FA which also suggests disk I/O problems.

I know that the original VT8237 south bridge had problems with SATA 3Gbps (in my experience, the BIOS doesn't detect disks at all), and of course this disk is SATA 6Gbps. I have tried putting a jumper to force the drive to SATA 1.5Gbps but it hasn't helped.

There aren't any BIOS updates available for the board, so there goes that option. I tried VIA's chipset and SATA drivers, but the system seemed to misbehave even more (non-responsiveness for 30-60 seconds when right-clicking on the taskbar, things like that), so I removed the VIA SATA drivers.

Of course, it might be a disk problem. I tried a short test with SeaTools for DOS on the disk which came through fine, but I thought I had a better idea rather than run the long test straight away, which I'll end up doing.

The old drive's model is: WD3200AAJS. I haven't found another source confirming what SATA spec it adheres to, but ebuyer.com reckons it is a SATA 3Gbps drive, which surprises me.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

- edit - the disk just passed the long test on SeaTools for DOS. I'll try memtest86+ just in case.

 

[Ketchup]

What model board is this? Doing some looking, this board appears to be pretty new to the whole SATA thing. Some of those controllers weren't the best.

Did the computer have Vista on it to begin with? And are you sure the other hard drive went bad, or began suffering the same issues the new drive is experiencing?

To narrow down the problem, I would throw in a PCI SATA controller card and see how the system runs on that.

 

[Mushkins]

Can you test the new HDD in another PC? Could be a dud.

 

[mikeymikec]

MSI MS-7258 aka PT890 Neo-V.

It was running Vista before. It ran fine for years, but then one day the machine rebooted during a Windows session, then wanted to run Windows Repair which never completed (left overnight). Connected to another machine, the disk would switch off during a full disk check.

Yep, the controller card idea seems like the only one, though I'm worried about a very small capacitor on the board which looks like it might be bloated.

Can you test the new HDD in another PC? Could be a dud.

Considering that the disk passes the long SeaTools test, what would you suggest trying on it?

 

[Mushkins]

Considering that the disk passes the long SeaTools test, what would you suggest trying on it?

Dump it in another PC and install Windows on it with that PC. If it installs and boots fine, and can install some software/run updates ok it's probably not the drive at fault.

If it still gives you similar problems, it's the drive itself that's bad. I've lost track of the times over the years where installs using known good media/image were similarly unstable from day one and the culprit turned out to be a faulty or failing HDD.

I put very little stock in tools like SeaTools. Way too often they pass the test with no issues unless the drive is broken to the point of making clicking/rattling noises. They also can't really test writing data to the disk over your data without wiping the data thats there, so the testing methodology in and of itself is questionable.

 

[mikeymikec]

As I had another SATA disk spare (definitely SATA 3Gbps though, 7200.12), I tried that in the machine in question, it doesn't have any of the atapi errors. I guess the final test is to try the 'dodgy' disk in a spare machine.

 

[mikeymikec]

I tried the WD Black in a spare machine and it seemingly works fine (no event log errors).

Would it be such a newsflash that the VIA 8237 chipset has yet another issue, perhaps SATA 6Gbps compatibility, or does it have a problem with WD's implementation with recent disks?

 

[mikeymikec]

Arrgh. If this board belonged to me, I would have sent it sailing into the night some time ago like a frisbee.

Has anyone heard of a board that doesn't let you boot from an add-in card, or that something bizarre is required in the BIOS before the add-in card is properly recognised? The only option in the BIOS that suggests it can is one where I specify what hard disk should be booted from, and with the disk connected to the PCI-E SATA card I've installed it just says 'add-in cards', however the SATA BIOS for the new card isn't showing, yet it does in a spare machine I've put the card into.

I'm wondering whether my 'mistake' was to go PCI-E and not the slow-but-safe bet of PCI.

 

[Ketchup]

I have not had any issues doing this with PCI cards on older machines (I am thinking if a couple old P4 and Sempron machines). I have not tried PCI-E for this.

 

[mikeymikec]

The only possible stumbling block I can think of is that the specs of the card says PCI-Express 2.0 compliant, but I can't find what version the board's PCIE implementation is. I would assume that as with most PC cards that they're backwards compatible.

In my spare system the PCIE card worked straight away as one would expect.

 

[mikeymikec]

I had the opportunity of trying a WD Scorpio Black drive on this PC (just to see what would happen) and it didn't like it either (same symptoms as the WD Black).

I bought a plain PCI SATA RAID card which is working fine so far (but I'm not at a point of completely breathing a sigh of relief).