Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (
More info?)
In article <gU80d.3378$9N5.293541@twister.southeast.rr.com>, NBK
<no@spam.net> wrote:
> dave wrote:
> > Sounds like your hardrive is starting to FAIL. you better backup just
> > incase..
> >
> > NBK wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Hi
> >>
> >>I have a P4P800 Deluxe 1017 BIOS, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, Firewire card,
> >>PATA Maxtor 40Gb Hard Drives, Windows XP SP2 slipstreamed and an Intel
> >>3.06GHz processor.
> >>
> >>Every so often i hear a knock from the hard drive and i get a hard
> >>freeze where Ctrl-Alt-Delete will not work. Sometimes a get various
> >>blue screens: Kernel_Data_Inpage_Error Stop 0x0000007A or a BSD stating
> >>that Windows has stopped due to hard error. Then the BIOS stops
> >>recognizing my hard drive.
> >>
> >>Due i have a motherboard problem or a hard drive problem or Windows XP
> >>SP2 issue?
> >>
> >>Thanks
> >>NBK
> >
> >
> This is happening to 2 of my drives
When you measure the PSU voltages, are they within 5% of their spec
value ? It is possible the disk drives could do an internal "restart"
if the voltages happen to dip for a moment. It would be more obvious
if both drives did it simultaneously. So, it could be a PSU problem.
When feeding the ATI9800, there should be one drive power cable that
goes only to the ATI9800. You shouldn't power the 9800 and a disk
drive with the same cable. The 9800 could cause a voltage drop in the
cable.
It could also be the IDE interface on the motherboard. To eliminate
multiple drive problems, ideally you would want to test the suspect
drive alone on the IDE cable. That is to eliminate some interaction
between two drives on the same cable. There have been posts here,
of people who had interference between devices plugged on the same
IDE cable, so you may have to either strip down the configuration
a bit, or use a plug-in PCI card as a source of more IDE interfaces,
to do some debugging.
In short, just about anything could be broken here, but disk drives
and power supplies are known bad actors, so suspect them first.
On the motherboard, the voltage conversion circuits are under the
most stress, while the big chips on the board should be pretty
reliable. And, of course, backup with your burner, with verify
turned on, so you'll have your info in a safe place. I learned
that expensive lesson once, by choosing to turn off a computer
with a defective disk drive, telling myself "I can back it up
tomorrow". When tomorrow came, the drive died with a spectacular
"sproing" from inside the drive (implying the head assembly
snagged in the head lock on that model), and all chances to backup
were gone.
HTH,
Paul