Computer issues downstairs..

[SE14man]

Due to these power cuts we've been getting i dont think it had hyelped the downstairs pc's too much either.
When booting 9/10 i am getting the blue screen of death.. it says something about hardware configuration but it only flashes for a split second then reboots the PC. anyway on that 1 time out of 10 i can get into windows, i run a CHKDSK and it finds bad files every time! Say i do chkdsk /r it does a boot time scan and attempts to fix them but obviously its not cos they appear every time!

It's a 300GB maxtor..quite an old drive now. It's SATA.
Anyway i was very confused about one thing. I formatted it with partition magic (i did this with it as a slave in my computer here)
i deleted the partition with partition magic. Then created a new partition with windows disk manager aswell as reformat with windows disk manager. Anyway according to CHKDSK and Easy Recovery there are no bad clusters or sectors.

Have put the HDD back into the downstairs pc. Have attempted to install ~XP pro 4 times now and am getting file corrupted messages. Sometimes it gets past the 'file copying process' then loads to install hardware etc and tells me to run CHKDSK. What i find bizarre is the fact that when i scan it as a slave up here on this pc i get no errors on my scan results.. why is that even though it's blatant there are errors on it due to it tleling me to run CHKDSK downstairs during xp installation?

Anyway..im stuck! What tool can i use to try n sort this out. I've let a test run for 9 hours using spinrite but is that likely to sort the issue out so i can install windows xp? Or should i be doing somethig else?

Thanks very much.

[guns1inger]

Might be a controller, and not the drive itself. Check the cables, disconnect any other drive on the same cable. The painful process of narrowing down the cause begins here.

[SE14man]

Lol Yeah i knew it might be quite a lengthy process!!
Luckily there is only one drive in there and that's the SATA. I do have a number of SATA cables though so should i give that a go?

Thanks very much!

[guns1inger]

Change over the cables if you have spares. Change to another SATA port on the motherboard if you can as well.

[Bjs]

The erratic nature points to an issue with the motherboard and not the drive but also try

1: Using an optical drive from another unit as power outs can cause damage to sensitive components and cause read errors
2: Another psu

[Nelson37]

Put the suspect hard drive into the KNOWN GOOD upstairs PC, disconnect all other HD and attempt to install Windows there. If it fails, it's the drive. If it works, then the drive is OK and definitely something in the basement PC is failing. Cables are easy and very cheap to exchange, PS only a little more cash. Optical drive worth swapping with the other PC. Then you get to the mobo....

[SE14man]

Ok this is what i have done guys:

Changed the SATA cable and plugged it into each one of the 3 other ports. Only seems to detect it when plugged into the bottom port and the 2nd form the top. Tried a new SATA cable which seemed even worse than the old red one i hadi n there. 9/10 the BIOS wasnt seeing the HDD at all.

Anyway i have tried 3 different optical drives and have tried 5 different XP CD's on each one of them at least 3 times over. During setup i am getting errors saying cannot copy 'xxxxx.dll' etc etc i mean its a different file each time!!

Anyway i dont think it's a CD drive as i've tried 3 others, don't think it the CD's themselves cos that really would be a co-insedence. I did forget to say! i went out today and bought a new SATA drive (300GB Seagate) exact same problems so that seems to rule out the drives.... i think!

these symptoms dont really match up though to the PSU, MOBO do they? or am i wrong?

Pls let me know.

P.S the HDD in there is set to Master i htink on Ch 1 and the DVD writer is slave on CH0

Cheers.

[hydra3333]

Motherboard issue by the sounds. Try powering off the power into the PSU leaving it for 5 mins then power on. Reset the BIOS or re-flash it to the latest version if you're able (that fixed a past issue for me). I had to replace a drive recently under similar circumstances, they're cheap enough so just try it.

Oh, and I had 2 motherboards fry within a week, once. Progressively lost USB ports ... and am working with another (successfully) which has a fried IDE but sata works.

[ladyb1998]

if you press F8 during boot up it will take you to advanced startup. click on disable automatic restart on system failure. this will load the BSOD and give you the error code. put that into google to find out what it is

[SE14man]

Yeah i must admit m8, in the weeks leading up to these issues USB ports were slowly beocming inactive..every time i plugged something USB that was it.. it restarted!

Now it's getting tempramental with SATA and even IDE. Think maybe a reflash of new MOBO!

What do u reckon?

[Nelson37]

I have seen CD drives with a mechanical failure which destroys all disks inserted. Were all XP CDs first inserted into the original optical drive? Check very carefully for scratches or smudges.

Check the BIOS for RAID settings, this can disable ports.

A bad PSU can cause almost any error you can imagine. They are usually interchangeable, you could try using the other PC's power supply on the suspect box. Power supplly failure is so common I NEVER exchange a mobo without trying a different power supply.

Multiple failures are less common, but they do happen. However, the odds are not looking good for the mobo.