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Hard disks drop out randomly, can't be accessed.


Phaenius

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I upgraded my motherboard, RAM and CPU about two months ago and also installed a SSD, on which I installed Windows 7 x64 Ultimate as a clean install. I now have a problem never experienced before, that gets very annoying. At random (sometimes in an interval of 1 minute, sometimes several hours), all discs can't be accesed at all for a variable duration (but about 20-40 seconds). All this time, I cannot acces at all ANY disc (SSD, HDD, optical DVD-RW). If some info is cached at the time, I can access, but new information can't be retrieved. I get no error on screen, rest of computer works fine all this time, I get CPU activity, in fact everything is working normally, just I can't access the discs. This is annoying if I want to open a file or stream a audio/video file from HDD, etc. I lose connection. I installed Kaspersky anti-virus and it found nothing wrong. Any ideas what I can do ? Has anyone experienced something like this before ? Is my motherboard controller faulty (i.e. a hardware issue) or could be a software problem ? I used AHCI when installed Windows. After the 20-40 seconds of interruption, everything else resumes like nothing happened. If I tried to open several files, it open (all of them), basically computer takes note and resumes activity. Again, I get no error at all. No sound from discs, nothing. It's a total blackout. I have 1 SSD, 4 HDDs and 1 DVD-RW optical unit. Thanks.

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No, but I NEVAH (in all my 17 years of using PCs) need to use this. OK, I googled before your last post and got Event Viewer opened. What what do I do with this ? It's a lot of info I can't process. Is that something in particular I should be looking for ?

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No, but I NEVAH (in all my 17 years of using PCs) need to use this. OK, I googled before your last post and got Event Viewer opened. What what do I do with this ? It's a lot of info I can't process. Is that something in particular I should be looking for ?

Well, the technology dates back to at least NT 3.5 (or possibly even 3.1), so you must have lived on another planet or you were so d@mn lucky :w00t: to never had an issue (possibly hardware related) in all these years :thumbup:.

Seriously, in theory a number of "standard" actions of the OS are logged in one of the three "base" event logs by default.

Besides those "standard" loggings (like boot and shutdown) each and any error or warning - of any kind - that the OS *somehow* senses should be logged there.

What you should do (at least this is what I do normally) is to save the current events log to a backup file (for future use) and delete/clear all of them logs.

Then restart the machine (the restart is not strictly needed, but is useful to provide a timestamp of first boot with the new, empty event logs) and use the machine normally until one of those "disk blackouts" (or whatever) occurs, then wait until the disk become accessible again, and then have a look at the logs.

The last few events logged are likely to be related to the issue and may give a hint (usually no more than a hint but still a hint is better than nothing) about the kind of error that happened (if the OS sensed it).

You might want to use a tool like the excellent Nirsoft one:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/my_event_viewer.html

to convert the data in a more suitable format (and then use a spreadsheet or a similar software) to list/order etc. the events.

jaclaz

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No, but I NEVAH (in all my 17 years of using PCs) need to use this. OK, I googled before your last post and got Event Viewer opened. What what do I do with this ? It's a lot of info I can't process. Is that something in particular I should be looking for ?

Well, the technology dates back to at least NT 3.5 (or possibly even 3.1), so you must have lived on another planet or you were so d@mn lucky :w00t: to never had an issue (possibly hardware related) in all these years :thumbup:.

Surely I had problems, but it never crossed my mind to look there.

Thanks for the suggestion. Problem is there are so many categories on those logs, I don't know where to look, but I will delete the logs and look for what happens. Luckily as I am, I won't be surprise at all if nothing will be found in those logs after a such "blackout".

But, while watching those logs, what do you think (wild guess) based on your experience, is more of a hardware or software issue ? I mean, can a hardware controller be that faulty that randomly stops working than work again to a point where Windows doesn't sense anything wrong ?

Btw, I replaced all cables and I checked everything. Everything seems to be firmly in place.

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I'll bet on a problem with a optical drive but, indeed, the eventlogs would provide nice informations and sometime the root cause is easily narrowed with the eventlogs.

Look in the system eventlog and you might find related events at the time the problem happens.

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what do you think (wild guess) based on your experience, is more of a hardware or software issue ?

Booting from an external disc (cd or USB, WinPE or Linux) would show that pretty quickly. Only of it's a BIOS parameter poblem it might be more tricky to find out.

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Since cables are (hopefully) excluded, next thing I would check (besides the event logs) would be three things;

  1. the order/exact way the drives are connected to the motherboard
  2. the PSU
  3. the effectiveness of grounding (since it is a new machine it is possible that some screws have not been tightened properly or that they do not make contact properly)

In my experience you never know the kind of troubles a defective PSU can cause. :ph34r: (or a ground loop/ineffective ground)

Then I would try - for a reasonable stretch of time - the thingy with one of the drives (one by one) disconnected.
But really, often the logs may provide some hint.

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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Jaclaz, that PSU is the first (unfairly) thing to blame by many. And with no reason. It could be, but poor PSU is always to blame when someone runs out of ideas. Why should it be the PSU ? It's Corsair, it's exactly 1 year old, never had reason to suspect it, it has nice ripple and noise, it's a good built. Why should it be the PSU ? I mean, everything else is working correctly when those dropouts. Besides, all the I/O units eats less current than CPU/GPU/memory/motherboard, etc. Really, a HDD consumes very little, SSD and optical unit neglijable, especially I rarely use optical unit and those dropouts don't occour neccessarily when using DVD-RW.

How are the drives connected ? That's easy. All are S-ATA compliant, all are connected via S-ATA connectors. DVD-RW is S-ATA rev. 1, all 4 HDDs are S-ATA rev. 2 and SSD is S-ATA rev. 3.

Grounding is ok, I screwed the screws correctly. But, if such a problem would have been in place, shouldn't have affected the rest of the computer as well ?

I am still waiting for logs, but really, I am so ineffective in reading this, I don't know what area to look. But will try.

Just don't make me use isopropyl again. :)

Edited by Phaenius
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Well, just to let you know about a relatively recent issue here.

Mini PC (mini-itx).

One of a set of three identical cases, bought roughly at the same time circa 2003.

Two identical inside with an EPIA 5000, one with a M10000.

The two identical ones were intended to be one the "main" machine and the other the (cold-swap) replacement for emergencies.

The first one of the two worked alright for some 9 years 24/7, with the replacement of a couple hard disks and PSU's over the years.

The second one, being the replacement machine has worked in the same timeframe of roughly 9 years, maybe 8 hours/month.

The one with the M10000 worked "normally" say 8 hours by 5 days a week (and also had once the PSU replaced)

Changed PC's and decided to re-use the old ones for other things.

I happened to want to use the (less used) 5000 motherboard for a "silent" multimedia PC (actually I wanted to make a router, but I had to chnage hardware for a number of reasons that don't belong here), and happened to have a spare (coming from a "bulk" set of things I bought in a shop that was closing) brand new M10000, so decided to make a "cold-swap" replacement for the M10000 using the old case (as said very rarely used and identical to the other two) with this motherboard.

No problem with the 5000 in the silent PC, but when the "main" machine failed and it was time to cold-swap with the spare M10000 a new problem arose.

The thingy decided (but only *sometimes*) that it had a second serial and parallel port and that the IRQ settings were conflicting.

The result was that - say once a week - the user could not print because the connected printer was lost (and since she had no Admin privileges could not re-install the driver).

A reboot and a re-install of the driver got rid of the issue and the fix would last approximately one week of use.

After researching, I found some obscure reference about certain models of HP printers causing this kind of issues sometimes when bi-directional printer ports (or cables) were defective.

I changed the printer (and cable) with an identical unit(I simply love the idea of having ready to swap units ;)).

The problem went away.

But only for a couple of weeks. :(

So I decided to try disconnecting the second hard disk, floppy and DVD reader from the power supply (the second hard disk was a backup disk, which I replaced using temporarily a self-powered external USB).

The problem went away.

This time it actually stayed away. :thumbup:

Replaced the PSU, reconnected everything as before, no issues anymore. :)

So, the "without reason" is - to say the least - "with some reasons deriving from experience".

JFYI:

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

jaclaz

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Well, I have a similar issue with my Creative soundcard (yes, the one that caused so many head scratches in the past), it misses the settings on reboot. It works fine for let's say 1 week (or 1 day), then the next reboot, BAM! it defaults to the stock settings. A curse from me, 2 lost minutes from my life and it's back to how it should be. No big thingy apart from the nerves. Don't know why it does that. It did on my old machine, it does on the new one. Same thing. But it's not that of a problem. But this, with the drives, yeah, it's annoying. I can't replace the PSU just because I have a suspicion, I'm not that rich (even if I were, I would make sure I have reasons to do it, since I don't like to waste money on Window). I simply can't understand why a faulty PSU could stop power to S-ATA drives (ONLY). I even tried before with a PCI card that had a controller and 2 of the 4 drives attached to it. Same thing. When blackout occours, it's for ALL of the drives, no matter that 2 of them actually are controlled by an external PCI controller. I simply can't understand why Windows doesn't sense anything wrong. If I were to simply unplug the power cord from a drive (to try and replicate the problem), than reinsert if after a while, will the affected drive still work or does it need a reboot ? If still works, could be the PSU cable on that branch, since it can simply have a faulty contact on the interior of the cable. But same PSU worked with my old MB, CPU and memory, no issues there.

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Event Logs, by request?

When you request to Clear any given Log, Windows asks if you want to Save - say "YES" and sabe them somewhere. Do this for each "type" of Log. The next time such an occurence happens, go back and look at them. There will be an icon letting you know something was amiss (Warning or Error).

It's been quite a number of hours since you were informed/requested and in the initial post you stated "minutes/hours". Surely it has occurred again already?

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If it has occoured, I missed it.

I already said that I don't know what to look for in the entries log. I have summary of administrative events, recently viewed nodes and log summary, each with subchapters.

Edited by Phaenius
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