System problems

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,229
Hi guys,

Got big problems with my machine. Basically:

March: Had issues with my RAID0 (2x750GB WD Black Series) array. Kept coming up with 'Error Occured(0)' on one of the drives. Eventually managed to get into Windows, reset the array on the windows software and everything was fine.

Fast forward 6 weeks..

Same problem again only this time, nothing seemed to fixed it. Tried to boot windows a couple of times but each time failed with apparent errors accessing disk.

By this time, BOTH drives showing as 'Error Occured(0)' in the RAID Bios.

So I dismantled the Array and installed Windows onto a single 750gb - the one that didn't give the error until last.

This went ok for a bit - few hours perhaps - until suddenly my SATA DVDRW drive dissapeared from My Computer in the middle of installing a game. Rebooted, its back, but loads of problems accessing it. Huge pauses, and other unrelated applications began to randomly lock up for no apparent reason.

At one point everything locked up for almost 5 minutes, I was about to hit the reset button when suddenly it all sprang into life and the last 5 minutes activity happened immediatly in the space of 5 seconds.

I figured I probably had bad hard drives, and went into DOS to run the Western Digital diagnostics utility.

I have now run the extended test on BOTH drives - taking almost 5 hours - and they've BOTH came back as Error Free.

Completely stumped now. No idea whats wrong.

Tried swapping ports over on the SATA controller, tried using different SATA controllers, tried different cables...

Spec is:

Asus P8P67 Pro
i5 2500k
GTX570
2x750Gb WD Black Series
Windows 7 Pro 64bit

Any ideas?
 
It has the latest bios. I'm using a Corsair HX520 PSU. When I say I've tried different ports, I mean I've tried all the internal motherboard ports. I dont have an external PCIE controller to use.

Prior to March, and for the entire 6 week period between the first hiccup and this problem, the machine was absolutely rock solid stable.
 
It now wont boot at all.

'Windows failed to start'

'Blah blah blah'

'The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible'

I want to think hard drive really - but it passed the extended test?
 
Ok, so last night everything was great. No problems, played plenty of games. Excellent.

Just before I went to bed the entire system locked up - couldnt do anything. Left it 5 minutes, hit reset, it came back into Windows fine.

This morning the system had put itself into standby as per power settings. I hit the power button to resume - everything comes on but... it never actually resumed. So I hit the reset button to reboot properly.

The reset button had no effect.

Powered it off and back on again - I had to do this via switch on the PSU as a long press of the power button also did nothing - and same again. Everything whirs up as normal but it never gets as far as video output on the monitor and neither the reset or power buttons work.

I gave up and left it and will try again tonight.

What on earth is wrong with this thing? It's all brand new kit! I've not tried clearing the CMOS but to be honest even if that works something is still wrong, I've never normally need to clear the CMOS just to boot the machine normally after changing zero settings :(
 
I am not currently overclocked. I was overclocked until the first problem at the end of March - it was Prime95 stable. I reset everything to default in March and it's remained that way ever since.
 
I think I agree with you, I reset the CMOS and faffed about doing nothing at all of any value for 10 minutes and suddenly it booted.

I've now enjoyed 6 hours of stability and gaming.

Just completely ridiculous.
 
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