BSOD problem - Smart fails occasionally

pioneer2000 · 17 Nov 2010 at 20:46

Unsure what to think...

One of my Samsung F1's has begun occasionally failing SMART on boot up and Windows will unexpectedly BSOD once loaded.

I've just run Western digital lifeguard (the Samsung utility won't load

) and the drive passed all diagnostics. HDTune reports warning as the drive health on 2 of my Samsungs - but not sure if that actually means much.

What can I do? Obviously something is screwed but not sure if the Smart failing and the BSOD's are actually related (they just started occuring at the same time). One weird point to note is that this happened first upon restarting after installing the latest Realtek HD drivers.... surely that wouldn't cause this.

pioneer2000 · 18 Nov 2010 at 12:39

I've run lifeguard quick test on all my drives and they all pass. Then ran an extended test on the drive I think is failing smart - that passed also.

Have unistalled the realtek drivers and so far seems ok.... happens randomly though so am going to have a look again tonight.

ES-Tool said something about cannot load driver when I booted it from cd. It loaded some of it and then dropped out to the command prompt.

pioneer2000 · 18 Nov 2010 at 20:15

So just got in and booted up. SMART failed on 3 out of 4 Samsung F1's...

Once windows had logged in, it froze and BSOD 24.

So far i've had:

BSOD 24 , 9 and 101.

As I've said, lifeguard scanned the drives and says they are fine.

Obvioulsy had nothing to do with the realtek drivers as i've uninstalled them last night. The only other thing I can think of is that I updated my bios a few days ago...

So, what can I do? Not sure if the hard drives are failing (but would all 3 just go like this?!) or something else is causing an issue with SMART etc.

Could this be a motherboard problem? How can I check that?

Should probably note that after it BSOD and restarted, all HD's passed SMART and windows appears to be working fine....

pioneer2000 · 18 Nov 2010 at 23:04

Anyone?

pioneer2000 · 19 Nov 2010 at 13:30

I've tried Seagate disc tool as well and that has passed all tests. The samsung ES-Tool is a pile of junk, doesn't boot via USB either.

Seagate specifically say that their tool works with all other manufacturers, so don't think this is actually a HD problem.

Yeah it's a UD5 - Going to try dropping back to an older bios revision tonight.