Adding new HDD to system slows boot terribly, causes crashes.

[jasongator]

Hello everyone..

I have an Asus P5N-D mobo.. and Im not sure if its the cause of my issues.

A few months back I upgraded to an OCZ SSD drive for booting and applications. Loved the fast speeds!
When I upgraded I never hooked up my old HDD back up (had an external so I wasnt needing the space.

Now that I want to put my formatted old HDD back into my system Im running into some serious issues.

Anytime I attempt to read or write to the drive (old HDD) I get issues and freezes and my computer takes 2-3 minuets to fully load. I unplug the old HDD and I can load up in 20 seconds.. and I get no freezes. Im so frustrated its silly.. It seems like the only hard drive I can get to boot up and work correctly is my new SSD.

I've also tried two different older hard drives.

I've updated the chipset drivers.. and done about everything else I can think of it get it working correctly.

Any help would be amazing!

System:
E8400
P5N-D
4GB Gskill
Win7 (64bit)
OCZ SSD
Seagate 7200 HDD
Samsung 7200 HDD
750w PSU

 

[Paperdoc]

The problems you describe sound like the old HDD is having troubles and the boot process is delayed trying to make sense of its errors. However, that might be just having some parameters set wrong, or a boot attempt that should not be happening. If your old HDD was IDE, check the jumpers on it and make sure they are set properly for either Master or Slave, depending on what else is already on the IDE port. If it's a SATA drive, forget this entirely.

In BIOS Setup, look carefully at the Boot Priority Sequence. It should be set to try your optical unit first, your SSD second, and NO other options. You do NOT want to have it try to boot from the old HDD.

In BIOS Setup, is the old HDD showing up as detected properly with the right size, etc?

 

[jasongator]

The problems you describe sound like the old HDD is having troubles and the boot process is delayed trying to make sense of its errors. However, that might be just having some parameters set wrong, or a boot attempt that should not be happening. If your old HDD was IDE, check the jumpers on it and make sure they are set properly for either Master or Slave, depending on what else is already on the IDE port. If it's a SATA drive, forget this entirely.

In BIOS Setup, look carefully at the Boot Priority Sequence. It should be set to try your optical unit first, your SSD second, and NO other options. You do NOT want to have it try to boot from the old HDD.

In BIOS Setup, is the old HDD showing up as detected properly with the right size, etc?

I guess i should be a little more specific. The HDDs are not really 'old' they are SATA drives. The samsung one is around 2 years old.. and the seagate one is less than a year old. Old was probably a poor word choice. They are the 'previous' hard drives.

My boot priority is 1.removable, 2.hdd, 3.cd-rom

In the area in bios where I list my hdds and add priority my SSD is first followed by the Seagete sata drive.

No other OS is installed on the other drive either. I can load win7 .. it just takes a loooooooooong time and I suffer crashes when I try to copy files to or from the Seagate drive.

I have formatted the drive using the Admin Tools at least 3 times.. it will have nothing on it and still cause these problems.

Exact same thing happens with my other HDD the Samsung. Dont recall any issues what so ever with the Samsung drive when I had it as my primary for my XP install.

 

[Paperdoc]

I understand what you mean that the term might better be "previous" rather than "old" HDD. Agreed, that's what I took from your post.

You say your Boot Priority is: "1.removable, 2.hdd, 3.cd-rom" What removable device do you have that could be used to boot from? Maybe you boot from a flash drive sometimes?

If I understand correctly, your Boot Priority settings are kind of main choice and sub-menu. You can set "HDD" as a choice in the sequence with no specification there of which one. Then in a second setting you make the specification that, among your HDD's, the order should be SSD and then Seagate SATA (or Samsung, depending on what's connected).

If that is the case, can you eliminate the Seagate from the HDD choices in the second setting so that ONLY the SSD is available in it? I'm thinking the BIOS looks at that list and tests out both units to be sure they are valid bootable media before proceeding to use only the first one, and is having a problem with that.

With the Seagate SATA unit installed, can you boot at all? I can't quite tell whether it boots but after a very long delay, or whether it fails to boot entirely. BUT if you can boot with it installed, can you then see it in My Computer and use it? Or, does that also cause you errors?

 

[jasongator]

Yeah, I will most definatly remove the seagate from the list so it is not an option as a bootable drive. Hope that takes care of it.

There is no removeable that I try to boot from, I think that is just the default settings for the BIOS incase you wanted to flash from a stick I would assume.

Yes, you are understanding that perfectly - in the sub menu I can make a priority list for the HDDs that are connected.

win7 loads with the drives connected but takes 2-3 minutes. I unplug the 2nd hdd and it takes 20 seconds.

When Im in win7 I can see the drive, access it and attempt to read/write to it... but this is where the troubles being.

If I try to write any amount of data over a few MBs (I've tried to copy a few GBs of pictures/mp3/my steam video game folder) and everytime the drive has either caused my comp to completly freeze or turned it into a slideshow where it is totally not usable.

Thanks for all your help on this Paperdoc -

 

[Paperdoc]

The fact that you can use the HDD when it's finally booted, but then it gives you trouble, suggests strongly that it has hardware problems. Or at least, the cables used on it are faulty.

As a start, can you try that HDD in another machine? Do it two ways. Once with the same data cable that you are using on it now, and once with a new cable. If it malfunctions similarly in the new machine both ways, the HDD has problems. If it malfunctions only with the current cable, maybe that's the trouble. If it works perfectly both ways, then you could have a poor SATA port on your mobo. In that last case, try re-installing in your machine and use different SATA mobo ports to see if that solves the problem. (I guess also in this last case of perfect performance in a second machine, another possibility is that the port is OK, but the power connector from the PSU in your machine is poor.)

Other item to check: sometimes the connection between the SATA data cable and the pins on either the mobo port at the HDD is loose, causing intermittent bad connections. A new cable MAY solve this. I've even heard of people who solved such an issue by tying up the cable to support it, thus reducing strain on the connection.

If the HDD performs badly in all of this and is thus suspect itself, you can download for free from Seagate their disk diagnostics utility, Seatools. There is a version that runs as a Windows application that might suit your situation. Personally I prefer the version that has you burn your own bootable floppy disk or CD-R disk. You can boot from that disk completely independent of Windows (so you don't even need a functioning disk in your system at all) and it loads a mini-DOS into RAM and runs, giving you a menu of diagnostic tests to run on the disk unit you choose. Most do not harm the data on the disk, but some tests and some "Fix-It" tools DO wipe data out, so watch the prompts for each test carefully. If you get error report info, write it down and talk to Seagate's Tech Support people about what they mean. If the tests tell you the HDD has NO errors of any kind, you'll know the trouble is elsewhere.

These tests may not be usable on your Samsung unit. You may have to look for a similar utility set from their site for that unit.