For anyone with Raptor or other SATA drives on NF4 Mobo's

amdnv

amdnv

amdnv

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23 Mar 2006
Posts
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Ok, I have been here before and am back after long break, I am bit lazy but seen lots of posts about rma'ing raptors or other sata drives due to taking long time to boot into windows (hanging at windows screen)

Ok this may not be bad HDD boards, Ive had this on all 6 builds of NF4 mobo's with maxtors, the drives werent sata300 as they werent out till recently and Ive never came across the issue where you need new firmware as of issues we read about on websites.
I got a fix on a very famous Nvidia forum, where users with many differnt makes of HDD's had same problem as me with windows installing fine and after dozens of reboots updating and installing antiviri and all apps, it would most times take 5-10mins to get into windows or longest I left it was 1 hour and it still wasnt in windows, but other times it went straight in in 20secs.

Fix for now is to boot into safe mode if you cant get into windows most times anyhow, then in device manager under the nvidia ata controler (also sata) dissable NCQ on the HDD(s) upon rebooting your pc will everytime now boot as fast as it did at first, mines all are running in customers homes for many months now, and NCQ dont do anything today for perfomance. it even can be 1-2MB slower in benches.

Also on another note for NF4 builders never install Nvidia Armour for now its broke kinda and Nvidia have said it will be fixed next new mobo build with NF5 or whatever its called then, Ive had one guy say he has cable at home and it dont work but at work its ok on ADSL (I may have wrong way round cant remember 100%).
 
I will try this today and let you know if it works as I havent sent my drive back yet. Seems strange though after people have returned their drives for a new one and the new one works as NCQ shouldnt have changed.
 
Im glad you have also heard of this, cause OCUK are going to get many RMA's HDD's and many of them will have nothing wrong with them. :(

To above user, Im not saying all users dont have a bad Raptor (or other make) but this is a known issue, its also funny how I rebooted pc dozens of times during installing windows and all apps then it would 9 times out of 10 take ages to boot and on occasion boot up in 20secs, PC's are funny buggers and its hard to say why some fault can occur then go away then reoccur, its never came back after many months with NCQ off as Ive had no phonecalls from the 6 customers.
 
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Today I received a brand new Raptor 150gb from Overclockers - to replace my 74gb raptor (needed more space).

After installing the system (took about 6 hours) with all my uni applications and a dual booting linux system - the system stopped booting. The hard drive made a noise (like it was shutting down) mid boot. Windows did not crash but the loading "line" kept going across.

I only left it for a minute as I knew something was wrong.

I loaded up Safe mode with networking and disabled NCQ after finding this thread and now my system boots again.

I must admit with my dissertation I am extremely stressed already and this didn't help. Is this a nvidia driver bug? (like so many on the nforce 4) Or is this a hard drive issue?

I can't believe this would happen - i've lost a whole days work and I hope I don't have to send it back to OCUK (so another 2 days lost).
 
Glad it helped even 1 user, sending back drive to OCUK wont fix issue, Ive had it on all drives on all NF4's, all drives were sata150 maxtors (not ones with firmware issues) but on NForce forums its across the board with all makes of HDD's, dont know if/or why all user dont get issue.
 
Hmm, since turning off NCQ my PC has been fine for the last couple of days. A bit of a strange issue this one. I wonder if the other people who sent their raptors back tried this first... time to cancel my RMA.
 
I just received a STOP: 0x00000024 BSOD while I was doing various tasks in windows. Apparently to do with ntfs.sys according to google. Still not out the woods it would seem :(

Perhaps the NCQ crashes have corrupted some of my files? (now that it is turned off??). I'm going to run a full disk check.
 
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