Some very strange goings on…

Sparky1234

Sparky1234

Sparky1234

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Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
161
I’ve recently purchased and built a new PC that I am having some serious and strange problems with. Its an Asus P5E3, with aq6600, 4gb of DDR3 memory and numerous hard drives. I used a fresh installation of Windows for the machine.

A day or so after the fresh installation, I started experiencing problems with one of the drives on the machine (a 1tb SATA Samsung).

I was getting the following errors:-

- An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk8\D during a paging operation. (warning, source:disk, code 51)
- The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur. (warning, course:ftdisk, code 57)
- {Delayed Write Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file . The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere. (warning, source:ntfs, code 50)

This happened many, many times – and was presumed to be the fault of the hard drive itself. I struggled to get off the drive and backed up on other locations on my computer. Just when I had started to give up hope, I tried the drive in an external USB enclosure. Low and behold, it worked fine – and I was able to salvage all the data from it.

Everything was fine and dandy for a while. Then, yesterday evening a 400gb ATA Maxtor drive started to experience the same issues. Numerous code 51s, 57s and 50s. As with before, the drive seemed to function normally using an external enclosure.

Last nigh was the last straw. One of my new 1.5tb SATA drives displayed the same issues, with the event viewer flooded by another deluge of warnings and errors. I also noticed these errors (they might very well have happened during the previous faults too):-

- The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\D (error, sorce:disk, code 11)
- A parity error was detected on \Device\Ide\IdePort1 (error, source:atapi, code 5).

Thanks in advance to anyone that can shed any light on these issues.
 
Silly question but im assuming that you have tried different sata data and power cables on the drive inside the machine? sometimes faulty cables can cause read and write errors?

also have you got another drive to try on the same sata port you had the drive in originally? just to see if it has any issues as its possible the hdd controller is at fault?
 
The PSU is unchanged from my previous setup. Its a good quality unit, and one I have not had problems with before. None the less, I have tried different power connectors - along with different SATA leads, and it appears that the problem persists and is independant of cables. It seems to happen to most drives when coping any large files, or multiple reads.
 
OK, this is getting stupid now. Was working on the machine earlier, and started getting the same errors and problems. It BSOD'ed and restarted the machine. About 3 seconds after seeing the Windows startup logo, I get the same BSOD. This happens with any number or combination of hardrives installed. I've tried resinstalling Windows, but that throws up another BLOD at the point where is tries to start the instalation process. It even does that with no hard drives installed (just the optical drive).

Is my motherboard broken? Does the world just hate me? Any advice much appretiated here - I'm about ready to throw this PC out of the window.
 
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Hi, is it possible that the RAM is faulty? I'm thinking that maybe the RAM is corrupting data while transfering it or something? Try running memtest for a few runs just to make sure.
 
Some of the various things I have tried.

- new PSU
- multiple loops in memtest
- new graphics card
- latest motherboard BIOS

Right now, the only thing that seems to have some effect is putting the SATA controllers into "PATA" mode and the "compatibility" setting. That seems to allow me to boot into Windows in safe mode only.
 
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