Hard Drive Problem?

[CYcolone]

I built a comp for a friend earlier this week (specs below), and it seems to have a hard drive issue, but I am not sure since I've never had the problem, so I thought I'd ask here. The hard drive will format and Windows will install correctly, but after a couple of restarts the system acts as if it forgets files. I boot into Windows and I'll try to run Call of Duty and it will give errors claiming 162 sound files are mising or something similar. I'll restart, and I'll be able to run CoD, but I won't be able to run something else, and sometimes it will forget certain Windows files on boot giving me BSoD's. I reinstalled and reformatted several times, trying various things that I didn't do before (ie: loading raid drivers before install) and that didn't do much. The order in which I install drivers is Windows SP2, Chipset, Network, Windows Update, Video, then the rest of the drivers. Imo, it's either a bad motherboard or bad hard drive. Has anyone else ever had this problem?

Specs:
DFI UT nF4 SLI-DR Motherboard
AMD 64 3200+ Socket 939
Corsair XMS 2x512MB DDR400
MSI GeForce 6600GT 128MB PCI-E
Maxtor 300GB DiamondMax10 w/16MB Cache

 

[KGB]

CY,

Is your Maxtor an IDE or SATA model?

 

[CYcolone]

SATA

 

[CYcolone]

I've been messing with this system since Wednesday and still haven't found a solution. I've tried updating the bios, different motherboards, psu's, hard drives, cd-rom's, floppy's, ide cables, sata cables, processors, ram, and video cards. After some battles getting my current system running, I have various avaliable parts that I have yet to return and now have his system and a test system set up next to each other. Both of the systems are running and have, for some reason that I can't figure out, similar issues. After installing Windows, and updating, each system will run fine for 30 minutes, capable of playing games flawlessly, until eventually the system will act up and give me missing file errors, BSoD's, or the issue I described in the first post. Both systems are running the latest BIOS with default settings which makes me wonder if there's a specific BIOS setting that something in each system does not like. Wondering if anyone can give me any advice on where to go from here. The two systems are as follows...

His system:
DFI UT nF4 SLI-DR Motherboard
AMD 64 3200+ Socket 939
Corsair XMS 2x512MB DDR400
MSI GeForce 6600GT 128MB PCI-E
Maxtor 300GB DiamondMax10 SATA w/16MB Cache
NEC Dual-Layered DVD-RW

My test system:
DFI UT nF4 SLI-DR Motherboard
AMD 64 3200+ Socket 939
OCZ Basic Series 2x256MB DDR400
MSI GeForce 6600GT 128MB PCI-E
Maxtor 300GB DiamondMax10 SATA w/16MB Cache
NEC Dual-Layered DVD-RW

 

[Speedo]

I'd guess the Maxtor drives. Do you have NCQ enabled or dissabled? If enabled, try dissabling it and see what happens.

You are using the nForce 6.53 drivers, right?

 

[CYcolone]

Yea, I'm using the latest nForce drivers. How do I check the status of NCQ? I tried looking for that before b/c I considered that as being a possible cause this was the first drive I've installed as the boot drive that had NCQ, but I coudln't find the option anywhere, unless it was named something else.

 

[Speedo]

Go to device manager, properties for IDE ATA/ATAPI, NVIDIA nForce4 ADMA Controller, and look at the primary and/or seccondary channel Tab. Uncheck "Enable command queuing".

Good luck.. let me know how it goes.

 

[CYcolone]

Tried a full format and loaded the nForce 4 Storage and RAID drivers provided with the motherboard during the Windows install. After the installation, I turned off NCQ like you said Speedo and then went through installing things. Installed the Marvel drivers (so I could get the other latest drivers off another comp on the network), SP2, Windows Update, Chipset drivers, and finally Video drivers (in that order). After a couple more restarts it started acting up once again with the same problems. I also tried running a diagnostics scan on the HDD using the PowerMax software on Maxtor's site and the HDD 100% checks out. I then ran the MemTest86 through BIOS for about 2 hours which found 0 errors. Then I don't think it's the CPU or Video Card because with a bad CPU it would most likely not even POST and with a bad video card, I either wouldn't see anything or get a ton of artifacts. Anyone else have any suggestions for me or happen to know of any incompatibilities between the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA family of hard drives and the DFI nF4 SLI-DR? Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[CYcolone]

To any one experiencing the same issues.

http://www.amdgamer.com/read.php?rid=136&type=1

I'll have to try this out myself tonight, but the symptoms are identical.

 

[Speedo]

I read the article.. interesting. But I thought you already tried disabling NCQ? In the article, his tabs looks different, but it could be because he is running Raid, and I'm not. I'm also not using the silicon image controller.

For the record, I do not install any drivers from the supplied CD during installation. First time I come into windows after the install, I install the latest nForce4 standalone drivers from a USB memory (or CDRW) to get the network up and running.

I have one 74GB Raptor as system drive. On this one I have disabled TCQ (command queuing) since my tests showed it was clearly slower, especially loading UT2k4 maps. My seccond drive is a Seagate 250GB 7200.8, which I have kept NCQ enabled on. Mobo is A8N-SLI, so my system is very similar to the guy in that article.

This system have been rock stable for a couple of months now...

 

[CYcolone]

Well, I actually tried what he did. I set the Maxtor drive as a single (JBOD) in the nVidia RAID utility and installed Windows from it. After installation I checked that option in the article, but the corruption is still there. For example, I try to install SP2 and as it's extracting it will tell me 'File is corrupt' or claim files are missing at different points during the install.

EDIT: I tried it on both the test systems and both still had the same issues. Guess my next step is to try an IDE drive in there.

 

[Speedo]

Still, what's done in the article is exactly what I recommended, even before the article was mentionend, namely "disable NCQ". Look at his tabs... "nvidia stripe properties". I don't have that stripe properites box, and I dont think you should either, if you are running standalone drives.

Anyways, your problem seem to be elsewhere, and doesnt seem related to NCQ since disabling it doesn't seem to help.

I would try with a totally different HD, SATA or not. I would recommend a Seagate 7200.8. The Maxtors have a high failure rate anyway. I was also thinking about the Maxtor, until I created and watched the results from this poll:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=27&threadid=1526672

 

[CYcolone]

Yea, I know Maxtor is not liked too much. But, I've had more Maxtor hdd's than any other, and they've never gone bad. I've had WD's and Seagates go bad. I just have better luck with Maxtors. I'll try an old 40GB IDE drive this evening and tell you how it goes. If it works out, then I'll be calling Maxtor or DFI tech support and/or returning it for a Seagate.

The reason he has the SCSI options is because he has his 2 WD Raptors set up on the nVidia RAID controller and the storage drive set up on the Silicon RAID controller in a single array (JBOD). I set up a single array on the nVidia controller and was able to make those options avaliable, however it didn't do anything for my problem.

 

[CYcolone]

I set up the system on a 4 year old 40GB IDE drive and the system ran flawlessly, and is still running after about 12 hours. So, he ordered a Seagate 7200.8 which will hopefully fix his problems. So does anyone know if there will be a fix from either nVidia or DFI addressing this issue any time soon? I know MSI released a BIOS update for their Neo4 boards that is supposed to fix the issue, but I haven't seen anything like that from DFI.

 

[NoiseReducer]

I just saw this forum and I thought that I might reply. I recently purchased a foxconn NF4 motherboard and a maxtor diamond max 10. I have had the same problems with windows forgetting about files. I re-installed Windows several time with no luck. I finally tried this: I did not install nvidia's SM ide driver and I deactivated NCQ. I have not had a problem since, which really sucks because the whole reason I bought that hardware was to use NCQ.

 

[davidos]

I have the same problems with my Maxtor SATA drive... Since day one with my A8N-SLI I have had instability and boot problems. I tried all the latest firmware updates for the drive but yesterday when I turned the computer on it didn't recognize the drivers for the video card...

I have decided to reinstall windows on a WD SATA drive... It might not be as fast as the Maxtor but I bet $$$ my problems will go away.... Maxtor Diamondmax 10 = Crap.

 

[davidos]

Is there a way to uninstall the Nvidia SW IDE driver?

 

[bwnv]

Read a similiar post recently. If you aren't running raid you probably shouldn't load the raid drivers at the F-6 prompt. If I can find it will post back.

 

[NoiseReducer]

Originally posted by: davidos
Is there a way to uninstall the Nvidia SW IDE driver?

Yes,
Just uninstall the drivers and when you re-install the drivers say no to the extra ide driver. You might also try to run the install utility again before you uninstall. Nvidia use to allow you to uninstall selected drivers this way but I have not tried it with the NF4 drivers

 

[Chode Messiah]

try another sata drive to rule out a bad sata port. It could also be a bad cable or the cable might be loose. if both drives don't work it's the mobo. I might even be a ram issue. If the mobo beeps thrice your ram does not suffice

 

[splin]

I've been having very similar problems with my Gigabyte GA-K8XP-9 (nforce4 ultra) with 2 Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200G SATA drives connected to the NVIDIA SATA-II ports. Standalone 6.53 drivers, but haven't seriously experimented with and without NCQ yet.

Given various reports of problems with nforce4 and Diamondmax 10 SATA drives I'm beginning to suspect these aren't very tolerant of each other. Initially I had problems (like many) with the bios not always detecting the drives on a restart (never a problem on a cold start). This issue has been claimed to have been fixed in later bioses. However updating to the recent and latest F5 bios has helped but not completely cured this problem.

More serious problems occur intermittently in Windows XP - ranging from boot failures to hangs when trying to access a drive. One boot failure resisted all attempts to get into safe mode with or without GUI, but restarted normally the following morning as though nothing had ever happened.

The hangs are usually limited to explorer or chkdsk or whatever is trying to access the drive but a reboot is soon required before it totally hangs up.

Once it locked up in chkdsk during a reboot when a reset was required to regain control; eventually I managed to get chkdsk to complete but only after finding lots of orphaned files. Windows did reboot but not much would run, with complaints about invalid entry points in DLLs etc. I installed XP on the second drive and ran that for a while before deciding on a whim to retry the first disk. This now booted up and apparently ran just as well (or rather as badly) as before the chkdsk failures.

One reinstall of XP hung two thirds of the way through. I suspect the problem was disc related as the rolling 'XP features" display continued to update. If this was indeed due to the NF4/Diamondmax 10 problem then that eliminates the NVIDIA drivers, NCQ etc. as this is well before they are installed.

I've tried to test the drives but the Maxtor Powermax 4 diagnostic software won't detect the drives (an earlier version, 3.x sees them but can't test them). Drive Fitness test can't see them either.

Other oddities are the bios will show the drives as 203G when detected before entering the BIOS setup, but if you get the bios to detect the drive it reports it as 160G. The NVIDIA raids bios shows it correctly as 189G. Driveimage 5 shows three disks with the third being a duplicate of the first. I'm not too concerned about these as I expect they are down to bios bugs/software that doesn't properly understand these drives.

I think I'll have to try a PATA drive to eliminate other motherboard problems (memtest86+ ran for 12 hours without problems). Any other suggestions? This is driving me nuts!

PS. A second machine I built for my sister with the same motherboard and disk hasn't shown any problems yet but it doesn't get a great deal of use.

[Edit] Just tried again and noticed the bios now reports 203G whether detected during initial POST or when asked to detect IDE drive in the BIOS setup screen. On reflection as well, the hangups I've had when accessing a drive have all been on the 2nd disk (ie. not the boot disk). I wonder if the problems occur when the BIOS fail to detect the drive size/geometry correctly? If so, that would be consistent with a boot failure if it was the boot drive that was misidentified or a drive access problem if it were the non-boot disk that was misidentified.

 

[mattburk]

I am having a similar problem on my DFI NF3. I have a raptor as my main os drive, but if I plug in either of my maxtors, I cannot even boot up. Did you guys ever figure out the solution.
I am pretty disapointed with the nf3dfi board. Poor manual, support, and wont work with maxtor. My maxtors work great on my p3.
matt

 

[Snatz]

I need to chime in also.....except I have a twist.

I'm running two WD Rap's in RAID 0 on the NForce controller. I also have a third Seagat 7200 plugged in. It's an IDE drive though.......

I'm having the exact same problems as in the article. Format after format, I leave the Seagate unplugged until I get everything running nicely. Twice now, after plugging the Seagate into the primary IDE port, about ten minutes go by and the system completely locks up. Reboot (through reset or powering down) hangs at Windows loading......if I don't get a "file missing" error.

How could a backup IDE drive be causing me system instability? Then, to boot, the Seagate diagnostics only run on Intel compatible systems.....according to their site.

AMD user here.