On my 6th replacement drive

[GoatIronMaidn]

As I sit here waiting for my 6th replacement drive from Maxtor, I start to think it might not be the drives after all. The problem is, after a few weeks of working fine, I start gettting boot errors like the system files are corrupt or missing and I have to use the XP disk recovery panel to reinstall them. I have the knowledgebase article about recovering the hive files and reinstalling them memorized by now. Happens all the time. BUT, when the Maxtor failed, I would use the 10 year old Seagate from the kid's computer to be able to keep working. Since this Seagate has always worked, I assumed it was just the Maxtor drives.

This morning, the Seagate gave me the same message. urrgh. So, maybe it isn't the drives after all. Could it be a bios problem? It was flashed about a year ago to Asus 1008. Could it be a motherboard problem or ATA problem? It doesn't seem to matter where I install the drives, master, slave, cable select, ATA, IDE, where ever I put them, they eventually fail.

I am currently back on just the Seagate, with minimal junk on it, just drivers. Although I did download the SP1 for XP yesterday. Possible connection? No viruses, just ran Panda and NAV. Any ideas?

The Maxtor drives were 30gig, they have since upgraded me to 60 gig for my troubles. The Seagate is only 8 gig. System is Asus A7V133 MoBo, AMD 1600+, 512 SDRAM, WinXP, Radeon 7500, I/OMagic Typhoon Theater sound.

 

[GoatIronMaidn]

I'm thinking it must be a mobo issue now. I use an ATI 7500 for vid. I used to have a car that had strikingly similar problems, come to think of it...just in reverse. It had a bad solder on the ignition module and when it got too hot, the solder would run and loose contact. Something like the capacitor deal...only different. If you know what I mean. The new drive showed up yesterday and I partitioned and formatted within XP, then loaded the OS. It seems to be doing the same as the rest of them. I'll have to break down and buy a new mobo next week. I just hate to have to toss the gig and a half of SDRAM I saved up for. Now I will need DDR. I'm also not too pleased that I can't find a mobo locally without audio, but I'll deal with it.

 

[gargouille]

There are motherboards that utilize either type of RAM, of course, but you might have to wait a day or two to get them.
Do you, coincidentally, do CAD, GoatIronMaidn?

 

[Mojanne]

I had a similar problem with my system, a P4 1.5GHz ASUS P4S333 also running with an ATI Radeon 7500. Problem started when I changed some of the video card settings in XP Pro. System either wouldn't boot, or would hang at the boot first 3 power on's. When I changed my display settings back, everything worked fine. Suggest you change your video to basic settings & see if that resolves your boot problems.

 

[c0i0nes]

The Internet security pundit, Steve Gibson, at

http://grc.com

, has a utility for preventing hard disk failure called "SpinRite". It has been around for some years, but I cannot vouch for it's efficacy. However it's $89 price tag is also several years out of date, compared to the cost of today's hard disks. You may care to check it out.
I still worry about your cooling if you routinely operate your system with "the side cover removed". This will prevent your four fans drawing the heated air from over some components. You will have nothing more than convection cooling some parts of your system, and warming other nearby components. This may have damaged some part of your kit in an unpredictable way. If you look at overclocking sites, where good cooling is critical, e.g.

http://www.ocwarehouse.com/articles/airflow/,

you will find lots of information about heat issues, and tips to improve airflow.
In an earlier post, I mentioned I had several Fujitsu disks fail this year. It is now a recognised problem with some models, but of course, these problems only come to light after several (thousands of?) failures. (

http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/fujitsu-hard-disk-recovery.htm)

I fear that with the rapid growth of hard disk capacity, and ever faster and hotter drives appearing, this may just be the tip of the iceberg! Maxtor may be next year's Fujitsu...

 

[c0i0nes]

Flash of inspiration - do you have a legacy soundcard in your system, like a Soundblaster 16? I have had a lot of trouble with a machine, until the SB16 was removed - the IDE port on the SB card was not disabled and conflicted with the 2 onboard IDE channels in unpredictable ways, like drives dying, newly installed CD-ROMs not being recognised, even floppy drives not working properly, or failing. Another symptom was slow booting. The Bios or Windows(98 or XP) do not give a clue apart from not recognising the IDE components installed. Really frustrating!

 

[GoatIronMaidn]

Ok, I ended up taking it into the shop to have it checked out. They found a brass riser behind where the IDE cable plug that was shorting out everytime I plugged a cable in, which was every time I swittched out drives and/or cables. They also found a bunch of stuff messed up in the registry, which I think is unrelated, since I took it in with a two day old OS on it.

But the riser nakes sense, considering where it was.

 

[GoatIronMaidn]

I forgot to mention, this was after I bought a new mobo and still had the same issues. I bought a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP and a gig of new DDR-333 memory and had the exact same problems, so I took it in. I'm just glad they found it. I guess this means the old mobo was ok, unless the short screwed it up somehow. I've only had the box back for a few hours though. I'll see how it does after a cold boot in the morning, since that's when all the problems usually started.