Been having some troubles with my pc freezing and intermittent problems with HDDs disappearing. A brief run down:
Recently installed a new mobo and cpu. All fine and dandy (except some peculiar mobo behaviour).
Now however I am experiencing intermittent problems and I'm finding it very hard to pin down the root cause of it all.
Firstly my pc doesn't always boot first time. It then becomes a case of forcing it to shut down (holding power button) as a reset makes no difference. If I'm lucky it may boot straight away on the second go.
When it does boot everything is usually fine. I have just also installed a new 1TB SATA HDD. This has problems staying attached to windows and will disappear, and sometimes reappear (as if a memory stick or external HDD has just been attached). The issue of it disappearing also seemed to coincide with the pc freezing. By freezing I mean the screens stay on but all mouse and keyboard input is ignored.
I also noticed that most, if not all of the time, this freezing occurred when I was torrenting. Nothing I'd ever had a problem with before. I tried many settings within the bittorrent client to no avail. So I bit the bullet and ran the torrents until it froze, then rebooted and looked through Event Viewer. Here I found errors regarding harddisk3 (my SATA drive). So I ran Western Digital's scans and sure enough there were errors, which it couldn't fix. The drive is now in the throws of an RMA so time will tell if that makes a difference.
At this point I decided to go to town and install the latest graphics card drivers etc as well as install the latest bios from ASRock. With fingers crossed I rebooted the pc, with no TB hard drive attached, and with my tail in the air I decided to chance torrenting again, to a different drive. It froze.
Once again I checked Event Viewer and now it says there's a problem with IDEport2 (the hard drive I'm now downloading to), a HDD I've had no problem downloading to in the past. So it seems the error has jumped from one hard drive to another. However, this one has passed the checks that the other failed.
So how is this possible? I'm thinking motherboard, but will still go ahead with the RMA anyway. Has anyone else come across this before? I'm loathed to go back to my old mobo and cpu as they're (comparitively) slow as sin.
Any experience or advice or ideas would be welcomed with open arms at this juncture.
Originally posted by sammorris: Faulty IDE cable or IDE controller on the motherboard. If different cables don't solve it, replace the motherboard.
Thanks for the reply.
I've just had someone on another forum suggest a better PSU. Would that also be something you suggest? I've not had any problems with hard drives or cables till I switched motherboards.....
Well I'm going to borrow a PSU from work and check that before I buy a new mobo. I used a calculator to determine the wattage I'd need and it came out at 417W, far too close to what mine put out in peak condition, so I'd probably need to replace it anyway.
It's getting to the point where I bin it all and buy a whole new system.
Those wattage calculators are always ridiculous. A proper 500W PSU will run a system it tells you you need 900W for, it's allowing for cheap nasty PSUs (which you should never use anyway, for other reasons)
