Insane Dell T7400

ozzy · 18 Aug 2011 at 11:54

Hey guys,

A few months back I had a weird problem - I was working away on my PC and suddenly a 64bit app stopped working (saying a dll was missing.) Upon further inspection appeared that the entire contents of my work files (on D: ) were garbled and part of the contents of C:

The files and folders were all there, but the actual contents was garbage. I formatted and reinstalled and it happened again a few months later. Really miffed, I swapped out all the SAS drives, installed an SSD, storage drive, and SATA controller and guess what? It just done it again some 3 months later.

The first time around I hadn't noticed until the app wouldn't start, but this time what alerted me was the crunching of the HD (Samsung F1) for solid few minutes so it clearly had a moment of just wasting the entire contents of the drive.

Hopefully I've not lost anything (overnight backups and Backblaze should cover it all) but obviously on a work machine this can't go on.

At the time I checked the RAM, that all checked out fine, it's had several OS installs, so I don't think its that. So I guess I have to look at either the mobo or PSU. Neither are cheap on this machine so I'd rather not take a shot in the dark.

Any ideas or similar stories? Thinking it could be the PSU given the HD's are running off a controller card

Cheers!

Reaper 392 · 18 Aug 2011 at 15:15

sounds like your HDD is on the way out because no hard drive should make a crunching sound
what caused the second set of hard drives to die so quickly im not sure. the controller card and PSU are the obvious choices though. what PSU and controller card do you have?

Insta · 18 Aug 2011 at 16:38

Try and run Dell Diagnostics, press F12 at post and select Diagnostics. This will run a quick HD, RAM and CPU test and may give you an error code to go on. There are also Dell 32bit extended diagnostics which can be download from the Dell website.

ozzy · 18 Aug 2011 at 21:12

Hmm the drive is only 3 months old, so I don't think it's that.

When I say crunching I mean the sound it makes when it seeks, when you really give it a run out.

I've run all the onboard diagnostics, and they all checked out fine. I took out half the RAM this afternoon and it did it *again*

So I've swapped the RAM back so we will see if it does it again. If so, that rules the RAM out.

It's weird, it's never ballsed itself up so quickly. I had only coped the data back onto my work drive, and no sooner had I reinstalled Photoshop it went again.