Hi Everyone

I am a desperate soul. Please help me. I built a P4 RDRAM setup in late July. Two Maxtor 80GB drives running off the same ide channel. Antec 480 watt psu. System smoked and I was loving it. One month later I hear click and my screen freezes. Reboots fine. A few days later same thing happens, but it gives me an error when booting. I hear mad clicks. Nooo!

I chalk it up to bad drive(s) and go exchange for a new pair. GO through the pain of reinstalling everything. One month later the exact same thing happens. Unbelievable. The system works flawlessly otherwise and never crashes.

I RMA the second set of drives, and those are the ones in the system right now. I am coming upon a month and am scared. When I shut down I don't hear them spin down nicely, rather I hear a small click. A few times when booting the bios screen was slow and I heard them both loudly revving up.

I don't know what the problem could be. I have been told power can make them fail, so I isolated a psu lead and use it for the drives and floppy only (before it also split into a zip drive and 2 fans). If these fail I am considering getting a new psu, but the system runs so good I don't think the psu is bad. I am using a Coolermaster rounded ATA 133 cable, and it is folded tight in one spot. Bad? The drives are mounted vertically, but Maxtor said this is no problem.

If anyone can help me I will give them $50,000. Okay I cannot afford that, but I will love you forever. This is the first PC I built, and it is so close to being perfect. Any help greatly appreciated.

P4 2.2 Ghz
Gigabyte 8IHXP
2X 256 PC1066 RDRAM
2X Maxtor 80GB ATA 133
Plextor 40X CDRW
Pioneer 16X DVD
Zip 100MB
Floppy
Adaptec 1394
Soundblaster Audigy Gamer
Visionteck GeForce 4 Ti4200
Antec TruePower 480 watt

=)

Welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif

When 4 hard drives have apparently failed and 2 more seem to be on the way, it doesn't sound like the hard drives are the problem. I would look at other hardware and probably not the power supply. I would wonder about heat, especially with all the stuff that you seem to have in this system. I would wonder about a problem with your IDE ports on the mainboard and even whether your software is doing something to the drives. Have you run diagnostics on the drives? I imagine you got the disks from Maxtor, so you should have the diagnostic software on them.

Give us more info about what you have done to figure out the problem so that we have a better chance at helping you figure it out.

Budfred

How much air flow do you have into the drives ( Cool Outside air)
I second the heat vote

Hi Shamus,

I'm with Budfred. Four bad drives in a row just ain't gonna happen. It has to be something else.

I think the power supply might be the problem. If you have a multi-meter I would check out the power leads. See if you're getting the proper voltages.

Also think about ESD. Electrostatic discharge. Are you grounding yourself before working on the computer?

How about rough handling? You should treat hard drives like they're made of glass.

I would call the company that you bought the drives from and ask if they have been checked. I've had HDD's crash and when I sent them back they tested OK. :o Sometimes it happens.

The consensus seems to be leaning towards heat. I tend to agree. We will next need to know what your cooling setup is. How many case fans? Where are they? Are they set to intake or exhaust? How many cfms are they?

I don't like the sounds of the kinked IDE cable either. Where that might lead to data corruption, I doubt if it would actually make the drive go bad.

I also like the idea of testing the PSU. Spikes or low voltage can ruin a harddrive.

Looks like ur motherboard is the problem. HDD's are much tolerant to heat so over heating shouldn't be the prob in ur case.
If PSU was the problem ur mobo would have gone down first.

If ur mobo has got Hardware Monitor Chip installed, examine the voltages ur mobo is receiving. U can use Motherboard Monitor, Speedfan or any utility, some mobo's have this utility in the CMOS. If mobo is receving incorrect voltages its likely that its sending them incorrectly to devices as well.

If its convinient remove all the expansion cards, CD Drives, HDD's. Just set CPU,RAM,MOBO,VGA Card and one HDD with os and run it for a week and see. Also make sure that soldered pins protruding at the back of the mobo aren't touching the surface of the metal casing. Protruding pins touching the casing would be normally problem for the board not for the HDD's but check it anyway. Use cardboard lining or some insulator lining betwn the mobo and the casing.
Also make sure that PCB board on ur HDD is not touching the metal casing inside the HDD rack. And don't stack HDD's one over another.

Use a multimeter and examine the PSU output voltages as well.

Wow guys this is the awesome kind of help I have been looking for! Bravo.

I use a Lian Li aluminum case, and the drives are mounted vertically right next to eachother in the front bottom of the case. There is only about 1/8" of space between them, but I didn't pay much attention to that because I have four drives in my Mac G4 and they are very close together. The two front intake fans are right in front of the drives, and they blow air over them. There is a top exhaust fan, which is partially obscurred by an ide cable. There is also a Coolermaster rear exhaust fan, and the psu fan. I stick my hand out behind the case to feel the air and it usually feels fine. Definitely not too hot. Every fan other than the rear exhaust is the cases' stock Adda fans. Model AD0812MB-A70GL, I am unsure of the cfms.

Seems like you all feel a good mobo/psu testing is in order. I think I would be better off taking it to the place I bought the parts from rather than trying to do it myself. I bought the mobo/proc/ram from a great outfit that builds systems for people. They ordered the parts, checked them out, installed the processor, made sure it booted, then passed it on to me. I bought these critical components from them to avoid any internet order hastle, but maybe they didn't catch some problem with the board. I suppose paying for them to check it out would be a good idea.

One other thing I feel I should mention is the amount of software I use that is "less than paid for" you could say. I know this is very bad, and I will purchase legit applications before profitting from them, however I am college student and can barely afford the hardware let alone thousands more for the stuff I need to get my schoolwork done. I have heard using this type of software can fragment the drive and cause it to go bust. I hope this doesn't make you abandon my case, but I wanted to be honest about it.

I do ground myself before working on the system, touching the metal pci slots and I barely move around while working. I wear rubber medical gloves usually. I also handle everything with great care.

So I guess it's time to bring the system in for a full check?

If you can afford it, taking it in for a check is probably a good idea. That said, if you are using pirated software, hopefully you are also using a really good virus scanner since that could be what is messing up your drives. If you haven't run a really deep scan recently, I would urge doing so with software from a known clean system on write protected disks or on the internet through one of the services that do that.

Budfred

Can you reccomend a good virus scanner? I have some friends who connect laptops to people's systems via firewire and do system checks. Is that the kind of secondary system scan you are talking about?

Thanks again.

Many people here really like AVG for antivirus and it is free. It is available through a link here:

http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15179

along with a bunch of other good security resources (thanks mjc).

What I was talking about with an outside scan is that there are a number of services on the web that will remotely scan your system and fix problems or at least tell you what they are. If your system is infected with something, some malware will make Norton and other antivirus software not see them, so you have to make sure you are scanning from a clean source. There are several listings for online scans at the link above.

Good luck,
Budfred

Wow that thread was a supreme resource. Thanks to you both.

I used bitdefender.com to do the full online scan. It took a few hours, found 10 infected files. Most were on zipped files that I had never even run, though. Some of the infections were "I-worm" and "backdoor.bot." It deleted a few of them, but then I installed and ran AVG and it found and fixed 4 more infected files. It now says my system is virus free.

I guess my next step is to call about the system check. I am going to get a firewire case and start backing up to a 1394 drive as well. I make DVD-R backups regularly but I am still freaked out. Hopefully I will get this figured out. You all have been very helpful I am glad Google led me here!

Take care.

ALERT!!!!!

Keep in mind that any backups you have now are probably badly infected and will reinfect your system if you use them without making sure they are cleaned out, if it is possible to do that. I am not sure if you can safely clean files from a DVD-R. The good news is that document files will probably be ok, the bad news is that any executable files may be a lost cause.

Budfred