AHCI Failure - Mobo issue?

SirConfused · 24 May 2011 at 10:42

Hi all,

I have a problem which is confounding me more than makes me comfortable...

I had some problems with a new SSD (Vertex 60GB) and a few bricked windows installs (http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18278114) but the thread I made seems a little invalid at this point.

My latest issue is that AHCI appears to have just stopped working for certain drives.
It's been working fine for about a year and a half through multiple fresh windows installs and the exact same hardware setup but over the weekend the AHCI bios started stalling on one particular drive for no apparent reason. The drive in question is a WD 500gb which was working fine prior to the issues and is working fine now. But to get beyond the AHCI drive detection I had to either remove the drive or just plain turn it off. As I can't currently use any of my other drives for windows leaving this one out of action isn't really an option so to get the computer working at all I have had to go back to legacy IDE mode.

Relevant info: I have all drives (including one optical) on the intel sata controller and have tried all the standard cable swapping/power swapping/stock clock settings shenanigans that people recommend trying before asking further help.

I guess my question is, can the drive really have died (even though i'm posting from a working windows install on it now) in the space of 2 days or is this indicative of a mobo problem?

Thanks in advance for any help/insight provided.

lrlcr · 24 May 2011 at 11:44

Sounds more like failure of the control chip on the board, particularly if your sata and ide controllers are separate chips.

SirConfused · 24 May 2011 at 11:55

As far as i'm aware it's the same Intel ICH10R chip because they are, and always have been, plugged into the same sata ports and therefore same controller?

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3304#sp

That's the spec sheet for the mobo which shows 6x sata from the ICH10R controller, 2 from Gigabyte's own controller and a JMicron JMB362 chip with another 2 eSATA ports.

lrlcr · 24 May 2011 at 12:29

Does the drive still report to diskpart in windows RE?

SirConfused · 24 May 2011 at 12:40

I can't even get to that point when AHCI is enabled, the AHCI bios stalls on drive detection.

lrlcr · 24 May 2011 at 13:56

If it does that with or without the ssd then you've probably got a cooked mobo/ram.

How does memtest go?

SirConfused · 24 May 2011 at 19:00

As with the previous thread, memtest is fine. I just ran it again and it did another 3 passes with no errors in around 2 hours.

Sin_Chase · 25 May 2011 at 13:10

HDD stalling powering up?

Have you tried putting in an IDE delay time to see if it helps?

SirConfused · 25 May 2011 at 13:22

I haven't but I'm not sure how that would make a difference as when switching to IDE mode there are no problems at all. I'll try it later on and see what happens.

SirConfused · 27 May 2011 at 13:00

I've tried updating the bios and I also tried adding the delay time (a full 30 seconds). Neither made any difference.

More ideas would be greatly appreciated.

lrlcr · 28 May 2011 at 17:54

can you plug the hdd that causes the stalling onto the other controller and run that in IDE mode?

Could be that the hdd doesn't like ahci for some unknown reason

SirConfused · 28 May 2011 at 18:08

That drive, along with all the other mechanical drives have been working fine in AHCI mode for well over a year (some of them the full life of this rig) until last weekend.

I can't adjust the 2 controllers separately in the bios, I only have the option to adjust the e-SATA controller or the other 2 onboard controllers together (JMicron and ICH10R).

lrlcr · 28 May 2011 at 21:29

How old is the drive, I'm leaning towards hardware deterioration

SirConfused · 29 May 2011 at 00:41

I just installed a SMART data checker and it turns out that you're probably right. Although I thought the drive was fine and it has the same on-time as 2 other drives in this pc the SMART data is returning some pretty disappointing numbers.

The read error rate is pretty high on the drive at only 16,600 hours of uptime. I'm going to try taking the drive out of the system and get windows on another drive.