Sudden restart last night, HDD problems?

slowrunner · 19 Oct 2009 at 09:05

Was just watching a film on the pc last night (last king of scotland on 4), and all of a sudden it restarts with no warning, and then prompts me to insert the system disk.

Went into the bios and it wouldn't detect my c: drive at all, even when putting the figures in manually. It would however detect my D: and DVD drives.

So this morning took the drive out, couldn't see anything wrong with the circuit board (last time I had a drive failure one of the chips was obviously burnt out), re-connected it and now everything's fine, running as good as it ever has. Btw the drive in question is the HD200HJ samsung.

Anyone else had randomness like this?

Should I be worried that either the drive or the drive controller on the mobo really is about to pack in?

J.B · 19 Oct 2009 at 10:44

could have just been a lose connection.

I wouldnt lose any sleep over it until it happens again.

Of course a good backup policy is useful to have.

slowrunner · 19 Oct 2009 at 13:21

Luckily anything important is on the F1 320 with additional back-ups to DVD of anything I'd be completely lost without.

Still considering getting another drive anyway as that 320 is almost full, and I need room for more stargate universe episodes!

weird_dave · 19 Oct 2009 at 19:24

I've had the same problem with both IDE and SATA drives. I eventually put it down to bad bios settings and/or heat on the northbridge due to O/C.

arc@css · 19 Oct 2009 at 21:39

Is your cpu stable?

icysniper · 19 Oct 2009 at 21:41

stargate universe all the way mate

slowrunner · 19 Oct 2009 at 22:45

arc@css said:
Is your cpu stable?

Yep, has been for the last 18 months, rock solid (apart from 1 full reinstall due to sp2 refusing to install on a cloned drive).

As for the temps, cpu rarely gets above 35, what I presume is the mobo/nb temp rarely goes above 45 too.

slowrunner · 21 Oct 2009 at 11:06

Hmm, the weirdness continues...

Last night had another random restart while watching some vids on youtube, IE stopped responding, then the screen flashed black, blue and red for half a second before everything went dead. Then it restarted (didn't lose a hard drive this time), got the prompt for windows not shutting down properly, then everything is fine and dandy again.

Had a look through event veiwer and it looks like nothing's been recorded.

pctestcard.com · 21 Oct 2009 at 11:36

Maybe it is time to clean the system dust and make sure the temperature won't get too high.

Try run some tests to see if the computer got some problems.

Hope this helps!
Bill

slowrunner · 21 Oct 2009 at 12:41

Case get's cleaned out every fortnight with brushes and hoover so doubt it's anything to do with dust.

Ran memtest for two rounds and prime on blend for 4 hours this morning with no faults.

weird_dave · 22 Oct 2009 at 18:55

tI sounds like something on the mobo is marginal, I'd start by going to stock speed for a week.
Checking the PSU with a multimeter wouldn't hurt either.