Hey gang, I need some advice or maybe just need to vent frustrations.
I have an older Nforce4 system mobo (A8N-E) with a 450W PSU that I am using as an HTPC. This mobo support IDE and SATA2 drives. I happen to have 3 older IDE drives(120gb and 160gb, DVDROM) and two newer 500gb SATA2 drives.
Recently I added an LG BD/HDVD combo drive also SATA and a Samsung 1TB drive, SATA2 as well.
After I added the Samsung drive, problems started, BSOD's, lockups, etc. Since I wasn't having problems when I added the LG driver(even though I heard that it could happen with Nforce 4 boards) I figured the problem was with the Samsung Spinpoint drive since the BSOD's were blaming NVATA.SYS and when I googled that I found lots of bad driver and some Spinpoint discussions.
The postings all said that the Nforce4 drivers are bad and that specifically Samsung Spinpoint and Nforce4 don't get along with the Nvidia drivers. So I remove them and tried to work using default XP IDE drivers. The result...HD access slowed down and the system was still unstable.
I updated the nvidia drivers to 15.23 just to see if the problem was resolved but I still had lock-ups. So I disconnect the Samsung drive altogether but to my dismay the system still locked up and I started having a hard time booting up. So I turned on SMART drive monitoring(don't know why it was off) and this is where it gets weird. All of a sudden one of the older IDE drives is reporting that it's about to die in 24 hours. Two other drives are complaining about heat issues. So I move off my critical files and disconnect that drive as well. So now I have three HDD's, one LG BD drive and another DVDROM in the system and overnight it remained stable.
Here's my dilemma, I bought a new Seagate drive because I was convinced that the Samsung was totally incompatible. I might have been wrong but is it too much coincidence that a different HDD was failing and it took down the system and I've been blaming it all on the new drives? The funny thing is that the failing drive wasn't even used all that much. It was more of a back-up then anything else. When SMART says a HDD failure is imminent, is it accurate or am I blaming a perfectly fine drive on what amounts to a driver incompatibility? Then I thought, maybe the PSU can't handle so many drives or maybe the updated 15.23 Nforce driver doesn't like my legacy drives either.
My plan was to monitor the system until the new drive arrives and if it remains stable then I was going to assume that the fault lied with the supposedly failing HDD AND the Samsung/Nforce driver incompatibility. If it crashes in the meanwhile I was going to roll back to the original nforce4 drivers. Then the fun gets to start all over when the new Seagate arrives.
Wish this wasn't happening on my HTPC as it doesn't give me much wiggle room to test given all the shows that are recording now. Any advice on how best to handle this issue?
I have an older Nforce4 system mobo (A8N-E) with a 450W PSU that I am using as an HTPC. This mobo support IDE and SATA2 drives. I happen to have 3 older IDE drives(120gb and 160gb, DVDROM) and two newer 500gb SATA2 drives.
Recently I added an LG BD/HDVD combo drive also SATA and a Samsung 1TB drive, SATA2 as well.
After I added the Samsung drive, problems started, BSOD's, lockups, etc. Since I wasn't having problems when I added the LG driver(even though I heard that it could happen with Nforce 4 boards) I figured the problem was with the Samsung Spinpoint drive since the BSOD's were blaming NVATA.SYS and when I googled that I found lots of bad driver and some Spinpoint discussions.
The postings all said that the Nforce4 drivers are bad and that specifically Samsung Spinpoint and Nforce4 don't get along with the Nvidia drivers. So I remove them and tried to work using default XP IDE drivers. The result...HD access slowed down and the system was still unstable.
I updated the nvidia drivers to 15.23 just to see if the problem was resolved but I still had lock-ups. So I disconnect the Samsung drive altogether but to my dismay the system still locked up and I started having a hard time booting up. So I turned on SMART drive monitoring(don't know why it was off) and this is where it gets weird. All of a sudden one of the older IDE drives is reporting that it's about to die in 24 hours. Two other drives are complaining about heat issues. So I move off my critical files and disconnect that drive as well. So now I have three HDD's, one LG BD drive and another DVDROM in the system and overnight it remained stable.
Here's my dilemma, I bought a new Seagate drive because I was convinced that the Samsung was totally incompatible. I might have been wrong but is it too much coincidence that a different HDD was failing and it took down the system and I've been blaming it all on the new drives? The funny thing is that the failing drive wasn't even used all that much. It was more of a back-up then anything else. When SMART says a HDD failure is imminent, is it accurate or am I blaming a perfectly fine drive on what amounts to a driver incompatibility? Then I thought, maybe the PSU can't handle so many drives or maybe the updated 15.23 Nforce driver doesn't like my legacy drives either.
My plan was to monitor the system until the new drive arrives and if it remains stable then I was going to assume that the fault lied with the supposedly failing HDD AND the Samsung/Nforce driver incompatibility. If it crashes in the meanwhile I was going to roll back to the original nforce4 drivers. Then the fun gets to start all over when the new Seagate arrives.
Wish this wasn't happening on my HTPC as it doesn't give me much wiggle room to test given all the shows that are recording now. Any advice on how best to handle this issue?