What happened to my Rig?

[Dannar26]

I built myself this rig around September of '14. Worked fine until I started having issues with steam. Now I can't get it to get into windows.

Specs:

i5 4690k
AsRock Z97 extreme 4
8 gigs G.Skill 1866 DDR 3 RAM
MSI Radeon 290
WD Blue 1tb
Crucial MX100 256 SSD
Arctic Cooler 13 CO
Windows 8.1

Issue:

TLDR: Games weren't installing right. They live on the HDD, with windows on the SSD. System froze, I did a hard restart. Now windows won't boot. The system will turn on. I can get to the bios. Nothing appears to be overheating. (40c idle temp for cpu...is that ok?) I tried to boot from my DVD drive to install windows, but that froze too.

Longer:
Payday 2 wasn't installing on steam, saying it was having disk write errors. I tried installing other games, and they mostly didn't have errors. Got the same issue with mass effect, but at least I could restart the DL process and make progress. PD2 just sat there "stopping" the download every time it would begin.

Thinking this was a steam thing, I uninstalled steam and reinstalled it. Same errors were present.

Earlier today I installed guild wars 2. It had an error and stopped. I got it to pick back up, but then it froze at the character creation screen. My whole system was starting to lock up, so I just held the power button in to do a hard reset. Now nothing works besides the bios. At least it posts...

Fix Attempts:

I moved my DVD rom drive to top priority and tried to reinstall windows. It just froze.

This is a bit WTF...the system is new, and I don't abuse it. I'm so busy with job and family, I don't have time to game 24 7. It's not overclocked...isn't dusty...draws power through a surge protector...

The only odd quirk the system has (as does my wife's which was built around the same time also with 8.1 and haswell Intel processors), was that it would always turn on randomly...wake on Lan was off, I turned off auto updates in windows...but the thing always started up with no provocation on my end. My wife's rig still does.

I also found that windows automatically "optimises" storage drives these days. Meaning it was defragging my SSD. Good job there windows. It never said anything about bad sectors on my HDD either...

Any ideas fellows?

 

[sandorski]

I would suspect Power Supply or Motherboard.

 

[XavierMace]

What case do you have? The drive backplane died in my HAF EVO XB which produced similar symptoms.

 

[Dannar26]

NZXT Phantom 240 is my case

RoseWill capstone 750w 80 plus gold rated PSU.

So I was able to reinstall windows 8.1. It took an ungodly amount of time to do so. I wiped both drives in the process.

Starting up again...the system feels snappy...but the generic windows drivers didn't take effect for the LAN. I have a wired connection. I didn't load my mobo drivers yet...but still. I thought by 8.1 some windows controller would pick up the slack automatically.

I will do more with it tomorrow...

 

[XavierMace]

Run HD tune, benchmark the drives and check the SMART data.

 

[Ketchup]

Make sure your drives, your SSD at least, are plugged into the Intel chipset ports, not the Asmedia ports.

 

[inachu]

Disk write errors.

Do a bios HD diag test if it has one built into it.
THen run chkdsk /f on it.
I would run all diag tests on this pc if I were you.

 

[Dannar26]

Alright, so by some miracle I got this thing wiped and reloaded. It still seems snappy...as it should be considering these are new parts.

I'm at work ATM, but tonight I plan on running as many diagnostics on this as one can. I don't know how to do them, but I imagine a little bit of googling will help me through my newbery, right?

@ Ketchup, I will have to double check that tonight. I remember when I built this thing, that I wanted to use certain ports over others...so I'm not sure if my failing memory means I sought out intel or ASmedia ports.

@Xavier, are these 3rd party programs?

 

[Dannar26]

chkdsk was ok for both drives.

Managed to install and run Pay Day 2. Steam still behaves like crap, especially while it's downloading something.

Installed guild wars two. That went ok. Game locked up in the first few minutes of game play. It was odd, the video beforehand had sound, but the gameplay didn't. The game was running just fine, until it locked up.

So, is the above photo the diagnostic you're looking for?

It makes sense that it's my HDD...I had WoW installed on my SSD, and I would play that the majority of the time...moreso when steam started acting up (which I guess we can hypothesize was my HDD). I recently let my subscription to WoW lapse, so that my limited game time can be spent on my Steam backlog.

Odd that chkdsk didn't report any trouble...

 

[DrDoug]

Switch out your SATA cables to test if they might be the problem. I had a customer recently bring in a system w/ a SSD/HDD layout and the system randomly locking up or outright crashing/rebooting. Turns out it was his SATA cable on his HDD. Replaced that and his problems went away.

When testing things like this, start with the cheap stuff! :thumbsup:

 

[Dannar26]

Alright, so I delved inside.

Following the literature from my ASrock mobo manual isn't always easy...it's pretty apparant that English isn't their thing. Anyway...

I'm pretty sure my SSD is in the INTEL SATA port. The manual says:
"To minimize the boot time use Intel Z97 SATA ports (SATA 3_0) for your bootable devices"
So, I had (have) my SSD plugged into 3_0. I had the HDD plugged in to the port directly below that...3_3. So, I swapped out the SATA cable (as per the suggestion of the good Dr. Doug) and plugged it into port 3_A0.

It's odd how the plural reference of Intel Ports, yet the manual only specifies one port. Either way I don't think these are the ASMedia ports...which the manual goes on to confirm their existence, but not their location. A google search didn't turn anything up...but I didn't try more than a few searches. I'm not thinking that this is the game changer, correct me if I'm wrong.

Have a gander at this fellows. This was captured before I switched SATA ports (which is annoying to do with my gigantic MSI 290 blocking the way!)

Despite letting this test go for the entirety of the night, this is as far as it got...

Tested it again today, after switching out the SATA cable and port, and got the same result. Distressingly enough, when I came back from my shower the whole system had gone to sleep and refused to wake up. Had to do a hard reset.

Other thoughts: So this system boots fast, and I can pop open firefox and do a google search all pretty much instantly. When I went to the image hosting site it froze up for about a half minute, then my browser lagged as I typed this post (typing faster than the letters were appearing. Yes, I'm not *that* fast). I suspect that this may be because I don't have flash installed. There were some type lag hiccups as I type this (after I restarted, and have nothing else going). So, it's lightning fast sometimes, but laggy at others? You're killin' me smalls.

Maybe I should try this with taking out my HDD?

 

[fralexandr]

did you run chkdsk /r?
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee872425.aspx

 

[Dannar26]

My understanding is that once a HDD starts getting bad sectors, the drive is dying.

Given that I 'd prefer to collect on the warranty and move on...

Here's what I got:

Keep in mind this drive is mostly empty...there's steam, a steam game, and a few screen caps on here...that's it. We're talking 20 GB tops.

 

[DigDog]

i'm also weighting in for hdd errors ..
the drive being empty has no relevance - every time the head finds a bad sector, windows tries to fix it; and then forgets it is there, finds it again, tries to fix it ...

simple test - your OS is on the SSD. remove the HDD. install something on the SSD, play around with it; does it work perfectly?
your drive is dead. throw it out.

 

[Dannar26]

So...

I took out the hdd. Everything installed on my SSD has been performing beautifully.
But last night my system just hung on some random webpage. I forget what it was but it was a legit page...like a news site. It had those annoying video adds..
And I hadn't installed flash. But it froze the whole system...had to do a 10 second button push restart.

So far this is an isolated issue...but a problem this system has had, it seems. I don't use my PC enough to properly diagnose this crap. Can poorly scripted ads really do that? I updated flash now....

 

[fralexandr]

Have you tried memtest?