Strange Hard Disk Issue

[paulstorey]

Hi all. I need a little help with an issue on my home PC.

Have currently just built an Athlon X4600 X2 system running on an Asus SLi Premium S939 Mobo. (runs Nvidia chipset). I have configured on there 2 Western Digital Raptor 74Gb drives as a striped raid on the NVIDIA sata raid controller. I also have two 120Gb IBM Hard Drives running off the standard IDE controller. I have completly installed XP Professional with the latest SPs and updates. Whenever I shutdown the machine the next time i power it up I get the message Boot Disk Failure, Insert Sys disk and press enter.

At this point I load the recovery console, run Fixboot C: and the issue is resolved. (however by default Fixboot wants to use D: (if I just type fixboot)).

I have checked both hard disks and they are fine (and were running fine in my last machine). The Raid array shows healthy and the other drives all appear fine. The motherboard is working fine and I have checked the RAM. I have also ran the machine with just 1 stick of 512Mb (which I tried several sticks just incase) This is the only issue with the machine. Once into windows the machine runs flawlessly (even under heavy load on games). I have also completly formatted all drives in the system and reinstalled XP (twice now) as well as install Norton and check for Viruses.

Anyone any ideas??

 

[firewolfrl]

pcbuilderman,
That is great advice...heat and voltage drops are HD killers.(notice I did not say voltage spike...because the drops are the true killers)

I always build to combat heat on the hard drive... I have altered more than one case so the computer can breathe and the hard drive has good cooling.....

 

[paulstorey]

Hi

I know its not the heat as the entire system is watercooled with 2 additional front fans and 2 rear fans (all 120cm) blowing through the entire system and all drives are spaced out with at least 1 bay gap between them. I have been unable to get another drive at the moment so will leave the system with the XP cd in it at the moment as it hardly adds to the boot time.

 

[paulstorey]

Just to let everyone know, the problem looks likely to have been caused by one of the WD Raptor drives. Although it was passing all WD diagnostics and surface scans last week it failed. I have reloaded my system onto the other Raptor drive and it appears to be working fine. I have also changed out the other drives for one 500Gb Raid array (2x 250Gb SATAII Hitachi Drives).

I would like to thank everyone for there ideas and also recommend avoiding Western Digital in the future as I have been told they have a shortage of the raptor drives
(by WD) and aim to have one to me in the next 3 weeks (and that is using there advance replacement service for one of there most expensive drives!). Compare that to the last IBM drive I had that had a fault was swapped out in 48Hrs!