Odd hard drive behaviour?

Mordar

Distinguished
Mar 21, 2008
3
0
18,510
Hello,

I have a hard drive that is being a bit of a pain, and is a bit of a mystery to me. I have a 3 hard drive setup - 2 in RAID 0, the third outside the RAID. The OS is on the RAID 0 array.

The problem is, randomly, and at not particularly obvious times, the first drive seems to go... strange. The computer crashes with the hard drive light stuck on (due to being in RAID), and when it reboots, the nvraid screen shows errors. When I go into it, it shows that the normal 500gb first drive is now reading as being 1.99mb big. The system can then not boot. If I wait a while of some random duration of time, then things are ok, until it happens again.

I'm wondering what the problem could be. I don't think it is overheating - the CPU temperature is normally around 29'C, the cores around 40'C, and it doesn't feel particularly hot, but it is a concern as it has been getting worse now that it is summer and the temperatures are getting hotter.

I dont think the problem is a driver problem or anything software based, as sometimes the system can be turned off completely, but still has the error when coming back on.

The drive seems to be ok, I did a complete chkdsk and it turned out ok. No file corruption, and when it works it works perfectly. Could it be a lose connection? Everything looks ok, but I'm not a hardware expert and don't really know where to look

I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas or suggestions as I'm at a bit of a loss - any would be greatly appreciated

Many thanks
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
Your loose connection note is a good idea and easy to try out with no real risks. Intermitent problems often come back to this. Simply open the case and, for every cable connected to every drive, gently unplug and then re-connect it several times, both at the drive end and at the mobo end. Do this with its power supply cables, too. Just doing that will "scrub" the connector surfaces to clean them of small bits of oxidation. Do not force anything or bend anything - only normal disconnect / reconnect forces should be needed.

Then run for a couple days and see if the problem has gone away.
 

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