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- Joined
- 24 Feb 2004
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- 1,083
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- Leeds/Cyprus
I've been wracking my brains over this since Friday.
My 4-month-old Seagate SATA HDD suddenly started doing weird spin-up/spin-down sounds (like a CD-drive trying to read a scratched disk), whirr, click, click, whirr, BSOD. I've always felt that drive was faulty cause I found a few bad sectors on it in the past, so I said, damn, time for an RMA. Rebooting it confirmed my suspicion, as it wasn't being detected during POST.
So I unplug it and boot up again to install Windows on my secondary HDD (a 1-and-a-bit yo Maxtor SATA), but hey, what's this? That's not being detected at POST either, even though it was a second ago!
I think, hang on, maybe there's something wrong with that SATA channel, so I plug both drives into different ports, and lo and behold, both are detected at POST and boot up fine! 10' later, the Seagate does the clicking sounds and dies again, and the computer bluescreens.
So anyway, to cut a long story short, I swapped EVERYTHING trying to find out what's wrong - SATA cables, SATA ports, tried one drive alone in each port, the other in each port, together in any number of permutations of ports, tried new cables, and I'm no closer to finding out what's wrong! Sometimes the Seagate works but the other doesn't, sometimes the Maxtor does but the Seagate doesn't, sometimes both do and the system runs fine for up to 4 hours before BSODing again (although on that 4-hour run I did hear the Seagate doing the spin-down/click noises a few times, but it apparently recovered before crashing the system). Throughout this I also tested repeatedly with SeaTools, and sometimes both drives would pass, others the Seagate would fail the short test (the Maxtor never failed the short test), and very frequently either one or both drives wouldn't even be detected by SeaTools.
So, up until I stopped testing last night, I was still fairly sure that the Seagate was faulty, but I couldn't understand why the Maxtor was sometimes not being detected. The possibilities were a. the Maxtor is ALSO faulty (although it wasn't doing the clicking noises, and what are the odds that both would pack it in on the same night?) or b. it's the motherboard that's faulty.
This morning, I boot up in the same port/cable configuration that I had left it in after my exceptionally long run last night, and neither drive was being detected at POST again! I flip out, headbutt the wall a few times, and then one last idea comes to me: I try a different SATA power cable, and it boots up!
So, now there's THREE things that might be wrong: either the cable I was using before is faulty, or the PSU is faulty, and, additionally, the Seagate may still also be faulty (it hasn't crashed yet, but the clicking noises it's been doing the last three days don't bode well, and I'm not sure a power failure would explain them fully).
So, how do I test if the SATA cable is providing enough stable voltage? And would a power failure explain why sometimes even the healthy Maxtor drive would fail to be detected at POST? It's of smaller capacity so presumably uses less power than the Seagate, but would that be enough to explain why the Seagate has also been doing the dying noises and failing SeaTools while the Maxtor worked fine (when it decided to work at all)? Is there some deeper underlying problem that I haven't discovered yet? I've ruled out SATA controller failure, because my DVD drive is also SATA and it ALWAYS worked, whichever port I plugged it into, using whichever cable, but I could be wrong.
[small whimper]Help?
[/whimper]
My 4-month-old Seagate SATA HDD suddenly started doing weird spin-up/spin-down sounds (like a CD-drive trying to read a scratched disk), whirr, click, click, whirr, BSOD. I've always felt that drive was faulty cause I found a few bad sectors on it in the past, so I said, damn, time for an RMA. Rebooting it confirmed my suspicion, as it wasn't being detected during POST.
So I unplug it and boot up again to install Windows on my secondary HDD (a 1-and-a-bit yo Maxtor SATA), but hey, what's this? That's not being detected at POST either, even though it was a second ago!
I think, hang on, maybe there's something wrong with that SATA channel, so I plug both drives into different ports, and lo and behold, both are detected at POST and boot up fine! 10' later, the Seagate does the clicking sounds and dies again, and the computer bluescreens.
So anyway, to cut a long story short, I swapped EVERYTHING trying to find out what's wrong - SATA cables, SATA ports, tried one drive alone in each port, the other in each port, together in any number of permutations of ports, tried new cables, and I'm no closer to finding out what's wrong! Sometimes the Seagate works but the other doesn't, sometimes the Maxtor does but the Seagate doesn't, sometimes both do and the system runs fine for up to 4 hours before BSODing again (although on that 4-hour run I did hear the Seagate doing the spin-down/click noises a few times, but it apparently recovered before crashing the system). Throughout this I also tested repeatedly with SeaTools, and sometimes both drives would pass, others the Seagate would fail the short test (the Maxtor never failed the short test), and very frequently either one or both drives wouldn't even be detected by SeaTools.
So, up until I stopped testing last night, I was still fairly sure that the Seagate was faulty, but I couldn't understand why the Maxtor was sometimes not being detected. The possibilities were a. the Maxtor is ALSO faulty (although it wasn't doing the clicking noises, and what are the odds that both would pack it in on the same night?) or b. it's the motherboard that's faulty.
This morning, I boot up in the same port/cable configuration that I had left it in after my exceptionally long run last night, and neither drive was being detected at POST again! I flip out, headbutt the wall a few times, and then one last idea comes to me: I try a different SATA power cable, and it boots up!
So, now there's THREE things that might be wrong: either the cable I was using before is faulty, or the PSU is faulty, and, additionally, the Seagate may still also be faulty (it hasn't crashed yet, but the clicking noises it's been doing the last three days don't bode well, and I'm not sure a power failure would explain them fully).
So, how do I test if the SATA cable is providing enough stable voltage? And would a power failure explain why sometimes even the healthy Maxtor drive would fail to be detected at POST? It's of smaller capacity so presumably uses less power than the Seagate, but would that be enough to explain why the Seagate has also been doing the dying noises and failing SeaTools while the Maxtor worked fine (when it decided to work at all)? Is there some deeper underlying problem that I haven't discovered yet? I've ruled out SATA controller failure, because my DVD drive is also SATA and it ALWAYS worked, whichever port I plugged it into, using whichever cable, but I could be wrong.
[small whimper]Help?
[/whimper]