Hard Drive or Motherboard?

[teddyv]

Hi Folks-

New build, new Asus P8Z68V-LX/2500k and a 4 or so year old WD 200gig hard drive (hoping to hold me over until the prices come down a bit...)

Right now, with any extended write, such as a big 10+gig file transfer or disk check, the hard drive will simply stop and the computer will freeze for a minute or two, then it will pick right back up and operate normally for another 20 seconds or so to another long (1 to 3 minutes) dead state, and so on. Occasionally it will Blue Screen but the screen flashes so quickly I cannot read it. Usually when that happens the board will not recognize the WD drive, just the DVDRW, until I switch power off and back on at the Power Supply. At that point it will show unsafe shutdown and I will have to go to safe mode, reboot to regular Win7. Oddly enough, the SMART is all OK checkmarks

Any ideas? Could it be a drive on its way out or maybe something on the board? I will say it worked fine until I started trying to run diagnostics on the drive and writing big batches of files to it.

Thanks!

 

[cantholdanymore]

Not an answer but after loading a bunch of software in my PC I started to have the same behavior you describe (without the BSOD). Used windows restore point but it didn't work. It finally was my 4 years old WD HDD that just started to act up.

 

[gladiatorua]

By stop you mean hard drive stops spinning disks and parks heads? If so, sounds like there is small problem with HDD. When it actively works it heats up. Due to heat something expands and breaks the contact near power connector, probably. It turns off, cools down, shrinks, completes the circuit and works again. Than it heats up......... and so on. The problem might be with PSU, but thats improbable.

 

[Taft12]

The hard drive is failing. The long delays are the result of the controller hitting bad sectors and bailing data off those onto known good sectors. Blue screens and long hourglass stalling come when Windows system files are going through the same thing.

It's an awfully bad time to be in need of a new hard drive, but you're in need of one. It might hold out a while longer, but you won't get rid of those symptoms until the drive is replaced.

 

[gladiatorua]

Doubtful. Bad blocks do not present themselves this way usually. Constant read/write errors - yes. Stopping HDD - no. It looks like temperature related because it happens under load, then works a bit(again under load) and shuts down again. Bios doesn't see the drive after BSOD. And again - no errors.
And it all happened shortly after the upgrade. Best time to pull connector wrong way or at a wrong angle.

As a solution I would advise disconnecting power from HDD and than connecting it again. Maybe "wiggle" power connector a bit in a socket. Might help or at least make it a bit more stable while prices return to their usual level.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

Sorry, But I have to agree with Taft here. A typical symptom of HDD failure, especially bad blocks is a retry, which generally causes a ATA internal error...which will freeze up your screen and system, as the bios tries to figure out what just happened. It's not the only thing that causes this, but it is certainly one of the things that can cause this behavior. OP never directly indicated that he noticed the HDD stopping. That would generally cause a click sound as the drive spins down and back up. If it were a bad contact, I would suspect a continual spin up and spin down, which would have lots of clicks associated and would likely also hang up the system.

I still don't know that the problem you are having is HDD related but it very well could be. I would do some block level scans with WD lifeguard tools and see if that finds anything. do the advanced scans.

 

[teddyv]

Thanks for all your help folks - I bit the bullet and bought a drive, will install tomorrow and report back. I did try the WDD Tools but the drive kept stopping - no clicks, it literally just stops. I tried on different SATA ports as well, same behavior. After a few minutes it picks right back up (and then a minute or so later it repeats until it blue screens or reboots.) Again, it only happens when intense read/write, not during normal operation. Oddly enough, when I ran WD Tools from an install to a USB key it ran without freezing the drive, and reported all OK.

It did feel pretty hot when it stopped - maybe as suggested the heat from the heavy activity was seizing a bearing, and when it cools enough it picks right back up - might explain the lack of read/write errors.

Forgot to mention - I downloaded the ASUS diagnostics and everything tested great (as did Memtest - 4 passes) except for the disc test. Same behavior, would burble away then stop, everything would freeze up, then a few minutes later it would pick right back up burbling away (then repeat until I stopped the test.)

 

[teddyv]

The verdict is in .....

Don't use a five year-old hard drive when building a new system

I put in the WD Caviar Blue hard drive and windows loaded up like a breeze. I loaded up the newest drivers via USB, loaded AV, and then while I loaded the updates (and rebooted, what seemed like 50 times) I fired up the old system to do the windows data transfer.

And that was when my awesome old workhorse Epox 9NPA+ Ultra matched with an AMD Venice 64/3000 finally gave up the ghost by freezing, and rebooting to C1 error board error which seems to be the memory controller. No harm, I had already backed it up - fitting end I guess to a really reliable machine over the last 6 years.

So the machine is up and running, cannot believe how much faster it is with everything. The move from XP to Win7 Ultimate will be an ongoing thing, fortunately it looks like many programs (like Photoshop 6.0) have free updates to get them to run in Win7 64.

Thanks again for the replies.

 

[pitz]

If you want a more definitive, 'scientific' answer, download the Intel SSD Toolbox from the Intel site (search for it on Google), and bring up the SMART parameters. It will tell you how many reallocateds, etc., are on the drive, and just looking the numbers should tell you fairly quickly if the drive itself is dying.

As for your new motherboard, you really should get a SSD ASAP, even if you don't upgrade the motherboard/CPU. It will totally change how you work with your computer. Use RAID-1 with your mechanical HDDs as well to protect data.