Hello everyone,

Well I consider myself fairly tech savvy and I have recently encountered a problem that has really stumped me and all of my fellow tech buddies. Let me know what you make of the situation:

First off, this problem occurred only after overclocking my Q6600 from 2.4ghz to 3.0, and I know I could probably remedy this problem by underclocking, but I'm trying to avoid that. The overclock has caused absolutely no noticeable problems except for the following. When my computer has been shut down for several minutes and I boot it and the BIOs does not recognize my second SATA drive. The drive is not found by Windows at all either. A simple reboot remedies this problem. Other times when the computer has been off, I will power it on and the BIOs will recognize the 2nd drive. Unfortunately, it will NOT be recognized by Windows (vista 64). When the disk is recognized by the BIOs but not Vista the drive shows up in Disk Management strangely enough.

Whether or not the drive shows up in the BIOs seems random, but like I said, a reboot always remedies the problem. Sometimes I will reboot a second time and the drive will disappear again. I've read that formatting the drive may help but there is a load of information on it and I would like to avoid that if there are other options. The most important part of this problem is that I have isolated what causes the drive to disappear occasionally.

I currently have 6GB of DDR2 memory in my rig (4 of patriot, 2 of g-skill). They are both rated at 1066 and supposed to run at 2.1v. When I have them set to 1066mhz in the BIOs, I have this hard drive problem. Setting the memory back to 800 completely gets rid of the issue! I know the performance increase from 800 to 1066 is small, but I would like to get what I paid for. I'm thinking that it may have something to do with my CPU voltage but currently I have it on auto and my motherboard only allows me to increase it by 5,10,15% as opposed to inputting a manual value. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm really stumped.

Update: The drive disappeared when I came home from work today with my memory at 800ghz and 2.1v (recommended). When I turned the voltage and memory speed to auto, CPU-Z tells me bus speed of 333mhz, rated FSB 1332, 499.5mhz for memory frequency at a 2:3 FSBRAM. Is it true that auto settings are ideal for this setup? Could manually setting the speed/voltage be the cause of the problem?

There is no option in my BIOS to allow the drive to spin up. I don't know what to do.

My motherboard came with software that allows me to change CPU voltage, Memory voltage, chip voltage, and FSB voltage manually if that would be any help. They are at 1.280, 1.872, 1.088, and 1.200 respectively.

You probably just have a loose sata connector.

My drives would drop-out randomly. It turned out that the cables had been pushed on too hard. I pulled them back out a bit till I felt them clamp against the pins inside and not had the problem since (actually every six months or so I have had to twiddle them, but its not really that problematic)

this looks like a fail OC. because whenever i OC one my my system beyond a point where its unstable it will fail load windows and say a system file is missing as if its got a corrupted hard drive. try reset the BIOS to default meaning no overclock to see if problem exist.

Firstoff what are your system components..cpu,mb,etc.
Next, have you tried booting without the gskill ram and just the patriot?
My self, I don't like mixing ram even though they have the same reported speed!

why do you need your RAM at 1066 anyway? im assuming you have the system at 400MHz FSB 7.5x multiplier... whats the point of having the RAM at this speed? offers no benefit in terms of performance...

well people like stupidly high numbers!lol

yeah who doesnt need 2000MHz DDR3 RAM? pfffff who doesnt have a 4000MHz FSB CPU... i mean name 1 person that does not have a four freaking thousand megahertz front side bus. WTF.

those 2000DDR3 will only gain you lower latency but bandwidth wise.nope TOTAL WASTE OF MONEY!!!

lol lower latency....yeah 9-9-9-20 or something rofl

well apart from the numbers the ultra high speed(compare to DDR2) it offset those stupidly high timing. but still no extra bandwidth gained(apart from Nehalem)