Denis W. Veteran Posted December 29, 2007 Veteran Share Posted December 29, 2007 (edited) I guess I'll use this post to share a simplified version of my experiences with two particular parts of my computer: my hard drive and my motherboard's chipset. Here goes: Back in April 2006 I experienced problems where my computer will grind to a heavy halt. It was random and the only errors that indicated something was acting up were a bunch of Event ID 51 errors in the Event Log. This problem escalated to the point where it corrupted part of my games partition on my main hard drive, a 250 GB WD SATA drive (model number WD2500KS). I searched up for solutions to this problem and found one: buy a SATA PCI card and connect my hard drive's SATA cable to it. The problem, according to the solution I read on Hardware Analysis (link: Hardware Analysis - Forum - Event ID - 51 - An error was detected on device DeviceHarddisk0D during a paging operation) was probably because of the nForce4 chipset being incapable of handling that much data flowing through it. I also had a 200 GB WD IDE drive (WD2000JB) connected via an IDE cable which may have contributed to the problem. Anyways, after I installed the card, everything was fine again... until yesterday. I got a 500 GB SATA drive (WD5000AAKS) and proceeded to do some serious rearrangement of all those wires coming out of my PSU. Following that I proceeded to transfer the data from my 200 GB drive to my new 500 GB drive. When that was done I removed the 200 GB, stuck it into my older PC, closed my PC's case up, removed the SATA PCI card (I wanted to experiment without that card for a bit) and powered it on. That 'experiment' proved fatal as the same damn problem returned, but with a nasty twist this time. While the PC was frozen and accessing my 250 GB drive, I powered the system off and back on. Big ****ing mistake. Windows XP and Vista refused to boot, and on the fourth attempt I got a message "A disk read error occured, Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart" after the POST. I tried Spinrite to see if it could 'recover' data, but even Spinrite froze on the first 7 MB. That led me to believe that by powering off the PC while it was accessing the drive, I effectively blew its circuit board. Since last night I was able to bootup my PC using the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows and access the drive, which thank God the data's still there. But it takes bloody forever to access ANYTHING on the drive. Data's copying at an average rate of a gigabyte per hour. :/ As of now I have my PC networked to my laptop, and all the data I freaked out of losing (i.e. pictures from camera with two albums containing trip photos) are being transfered to my laptop. Then I'll have to RMA this drive. Lesson learned: keep using that PCI card until I can get rid of this goddamned motherboard, this ASUS A8N-SLi. I also figured that I could've accidentally bent a capacitor or two while rearranging the cables, but surely bent capacitors don't kill hard drives? Update: see last post. Edited December 29, 2007 by rm20010 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yusuf M. Veteran Posted December 29, 2007 Veteran Share Posted December 29, 2007 Ouch, that really sucks. I'm glad you were able to retrieve your valuable files. Some people aren't as fortunate as you in situations like this, so look on the bright side and see it as a learning experience. It's all trial and error with computers. By the way the bent capacitors should work fine. What matters is that they stay fixed to the motherboard. A broken capacitor on the other hand might bring up other problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Denis W. Veteran Posted December 29, 2007 Author Veteran Share Posted December 29, 2007 (edited) Well guess what, this problem happened to my NEW 500 GB hard drive as well. That led me to believe it wasn't the hard drives that were dying, but instead the PCI SATA card that was messed... Nope. Even without the SATA card my new hard drive kept locking up. Then I decided to mount my "dead" 250 GB hard drive into my old VAIO PC, and also stick the PCI SATA card in there (the VAIO's motherboard, also an ASUS board, did not have SATA connectivity readily available at the time). Guess what? Hard drive worked like a charm (for now, at least). I'm running a couple of Spinrite tests to check for any hard drive errors, but in the meantime, I believe now is the time for this A8N-SLi motherboard to burn in silicon hell. It has done this BS to me twice in two years - enough is enough. I'm almost certain it's the motherboard: it's definitely not the video cards (occured to both my older 7800 GT and my current 8800 GT), definitely not the hard drives or their cables (I used the same SATA cable to connect my 200 GB to my VAIO) and hopefully not the PSU either (it's an Enermax Noisetaker 485W, and even if it was the PSU then I should've noticed serious glitches while gaming). In any case, I most likely need a new motherboard. But with a new motherboard I will most likely need to also replace my Socket 939 CPU (AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+) and those two sticks of value OCZ DDR RAM, as almost every single motherboard these days hold Socket 775 Intel CPUs and DDR2 RAM sticks. Of course I can get an older Socket 939 motherboard (if they're still around) but eventually I'd end up wasting more money going that route than just upgrading now to a safer future-proof route. Any suggestions on a good reliable motherboard, and possibly suggested Core 2 CPUs and RAM to match? Hopefully this new combination won't run me more than 400 or 500 CAD. Some people aren't as fortunate as you in situations like this, so look on the bright side and see it as a learning experience. It's all trial and error with computers. That's true. I did learn quite a bit on how to resolve a variety of problems based on my own experiences with this PC. But heck, ask those Mac users: computers are supposed to help you out, not force you to play computer mechanic when it screws up. ;) Edited December 29, 2007 by rm20010 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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