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Serious IDE controller 1 problems.

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PatrickBreeden

Programmer
Mar 3, 2003
2
US
First off, I'm working with a BIOSTAR M7VKQ motherboard with-- usually --a Western Digital 60 gig harddrive. 256mb SDRAM, on and on. That's not my real problem. I've nearly confirmed the problem, but I'd like second opinions on my hypothesis.

Lately, my system seems to crash constantly and take a rediculous time to read the IDE controllers. I thought maybe the crashing was a memory problem, so I have tested the machine with a 256MB stick, a 32MB stick, and a 64MB stick(all SDRAM, naturally). Everytime I try to boot the machine again, nothing has changed; I still get the same problems. Shortly after this, my primary harddrive wouldn't read at all anymore. I thought it was the IDE mainboard in the drive itself, so I slaved it onto another harddrive. This seemed to be working, minus the odd freezes and crashes. Shortly after, the slow IDE reads returned and the freezes continued. It got to the point where I was lucky to see the WinXP loading screen. If I WAS lucky to get that far, I only got to see my desktop for oh say...three to five minutes. I have tested the machine with each of the previously mentioned drives individually, alternately tried both of them as slave and master, and I've even tested four other harddrives I own. The other four won't even get a read.

I must admit that my system runs in a rather hot environment. It usually bears a temperature of 130+F. Am I witnessing the slow death of my IDE controller due to heat damage?
 
Does the HDD 'read' light stay on steady for a minute or two when the system freezes?

Were you trying the other drives on the same IDE cable and IDE channel (=mainboard socket), or were you moving to the second IDE channel/cable?
 
I haven't been able to check the light yet. That's the next thing I plan to do now that you mentioned it. Yes, I have discarded the CD-ROM from the system and no, I didn't try the second IDE socket for the drives. That slipped my mind as well. I'll see what happens and report back. Thanks for the help and ideas.
 
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