Quake3World

so, getting some freezing lately. i do a soft reboot and both my sata drives disappear in bios, hence disk boot failure. have to shutdown completely and then everything is back to normal. the fuck? has only happened once since my last thread about thinking creative beta drivers were causing system instability. this was one of the things that was happening but apparently has no correlation to the creative driver issue.

2 wd 250gb sata drives
asus a8n sli-p with latest bios

what's the haps here??

Could be drive fault, cable fault, PSU fault (seems the most likely to me) or motherboard drive controller fault.

If you can remove as many components from the PC as possible and test, this will see if the power supply is being pushed too hard.

If you have some spare sata cables, swapping these out would disprove the cable theory (it's pretty unlikely to be the sata cables unless they've been abused)

You could also try moving the drives onto the second controller and see if the behaviour persists. This would eliminate the drive controller as the source of the fault, but if you're running a raid array swapping the drives to the other controller probably wont be simple.

well, i replaced the psu cause that computer stopped posting altogether about a week ago. everything turns on but nothing on screen. i guess ill try a new vid card tomorrow? tried to boot with 1 stick of ram at a time from the 4 i have and same thing. cleared cmos and nothing.

anything else i can try besides replacing cpu or mobo? i really dont want to replace either as this was to be my last desktop.

Have you tried what foo suggested? Remove everything superflous. Even unlog HDDs, sound card, optical drive.. everything. Even try booting without the vid card, see if you get beep error codes. In other words, narrow it down as far as possible, and see if the problem is in the core, or an added component.

i did do that and the same thing happened. tried to reseat cpu today and had a hell of a time getting the heatsink off. cpu was practically glued on there. ended up bending the shit out of some of the contacts. got it reseated finally but i think it was toast before that happened. weird though cause my temps never went over 60C.

this sucks. have to downgrade to a 4200 if i stay with socket 939. only upgraded a year ago.

motherboard. socket was fucked or something. luckily i found an asus a8r32-mvp deluxe locally for pretty cheap. wonder how long this one will last...

Ah yes... more nforce storage controller problems.

dont think it was that that wouldnt allow it to post. locking the cpu in the socket was much harder than it should be and there was this weird creaking sound like something wasn't lining up correctly when i did try to lock it. my heatsink fit more snug in the new board than it ever did in the a8n sli p, which is weird cause they're both asus boards. i let it sit with the old board for like 20 mins to see if somehow things would work the last time i tried booting it and noticed the heatsink was room temp when i gave up and swapped the boards out, like no power to the cpu.

maybe the storage controller was failing anyway though cause my drives did disappear upon hard reboot a couple times.