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Guess the Faulty Hardware?
EDIT: it was the SSD apparently, see my last post in this thread if curious about the details
Having some PC trouble and I posted on a couple tech-support forums but no one seems to have any idea what the problem could be so I figured I'd try my luck here.
2 days ago - Have Windows 7 64-bit installed on an SSD, works fine. Have Windows XP 32-bit installed on a separate SATA drive in the same PC. Works fine. Everything works fine.
1 day ago - No major hardware (or software changes), but now after loading into Win7 OR WinXP after roughly 10 minutes the system freezes up, with no error messages and no BSOD. And its a 99% freeze, because I can still do things like move my mouse and even (sometimes) click on the Start button, but I can't run programs, bring up task manager and have to manually power down the machine to reboot.
Things that don't seem to be the problem:
1) Not viruses/malware.
2) Not overheating (speedfan shows my cpus at 30-40c and my gpu at 40c)
3) Not any specific windows corruption issue, because this is affecting two completely different versions of windows installed on two completely different hard drives.
4) Have latest drivers and all that.
5) PC isn't dusty or dirty
Misc. Additional Info:
1) I can't boot into safe mode in windows 7, I get to the login screen prior to the desktop and within 2-3 seconds the computer just reboots on its own with no warning, every time
2) I tried to reinstall a fresh copy of Windows 7 on the SSD drive, but during installation while it was extracting files from the DVD I got an error "source files cannot be accessed" or something similar to that. The DVD is fine, tested in another machine, and the DVD-ROM drive doesn't seem to be the problem either, making me think maybe my SSD is going bad.
But if its my SSD going bad, why is this also affecting my WinXP install on a different SATA drive. And why does everything work fine for about 10 minutes before freezing up?
Any ideas, tips, suggestions, or advice for narrowing down the cause of the problem, or requests for additional info are appreciated. Thanks.
Comments
This is just a guess, but I would say motherboard? Would be a common 'component' to both copies of windows.
Memory would be another, but I would think if it was causing the problem, you wouldn't be able to do anything at all, once it was crashing you.
I am sure someone can help you more, just the MB would be my thoughts if it was happening to me.
Having worked with computers a few years now, my initial thoughts as well are the motherboard or the memory.
With a close freeze on xp if the memory fails to be accessed or is assumed to be full, it is paged onto the hard disk drive, which is pretty slow. Listen to the hard drive when it freezes up and if you here it "whizzing" or "grinding", then you most likely need to replace your memory.
Sounds like an SSD Controller error.
yeah i think its the mobo to
i had a similar problem not long ago; and the reason had todo xwith my onboard network card so i had to buy a new mobo (upgrage from usb2 to 3)
and also the memory was fault to but that was still in warenty so i got new one for free
My guess is you have the Intel quick start/boot program installed (forget the proper name). It's the program that allows you to look at drive states and should be used if you are using the instant on feature with an SSD.
It caused the same issue for me. HD light comes on, stays on and locks up the machine.
Uninstall the program.
EDIT: nm ignore my post. I didn't read about your access issues.
Bad mother board.
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It could be many things - bad MoBo being the most extreme possibility. It could be that, but I'd check other things first.
Your inability to re-install Win7 from DVD makes me think that there's something flaky with your disk IO. It could be the IDE/SATA controller on your mobo but something as simple as a loose connection or a bad cable on any of your disks can cause all the other disks to act flaky. Way back in the floppy days, I saw something similar to what you're describing with a bad floppy disk drive that wasn't even being used when the crashes happened.
If you have spare IDE/SATA cables lying around, the easiest thing to do first is to replace the cables to your SSD, HD and DVD one at a time, reboot. and see what happens. While you have your case open, re-seat your GPU and any other add-on cards and check all power connections to make sure nothing has come loose.
Give that a shot. It'll either work or you'll waste 15 minutes.
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If it always happens after about 10 minutes and not randomly, and it isn't heat-related, that makes this issue tricky to figure out.
The symptoms you describe are that of the hard drive not being accessible by the system.
Does your temperature monitor display temperatures for the motherboard (northbridge, southbridge)? Not all motherboards have thermal sensors; one good program to view all of those temperatures would be HWiNFO.
Did you try replacing your SATA cables?
What is the model of the motherboard? Did you check to see if others have issues similar to yours? Is there a BIOS update available?
From what you're describing, it sounds like a "pause" of read/write to the hard drive. I've actually seen this particular issue a few times.
The first question, is do you have a Creative sound card or a card with a creative chipset on that system? If you do, then that's the problem. Essentially, creative cards are so extremely poorly designed, that they interfere with the rest of the computer in undesirable ways. What your describing is a "bug" where the creative card interferes with the caching of the HD (either by having a raid card, or using IRRT or AHCI). It doesn't matter if the drive is attached to a raid card or not, it is the existence of the raid card that triggers the Creative card doing this. You can either disable all raid features, and advanced drive features (AHCI and IRRT), or you can pull the creative card.
If you don't have a creative card, then it depends. If your mainboard has multiple SATA controllers, put the drives on the different controller to see if it's a specific controller causing the issue. If both controllers present the problem, then it's likely a problem with the processor (for instance, one of the cores is bad).
To be perfectly honest, the only times I've ever seen the "pause" issue you've described, a creative card was always at fault. So...
Behaves like a heat issue or power issue.
If you recently upgraded to better parts, and did not replace your power supply, that would be where I'd start. Quizzical has answered several threads in the hardware forum with mentions of good power supplies. Also, if you've set the bios to overclock your system, don't do that.
If it's not the power supply, then my guess would be a component that only shows issues when it heats up to a normal operating temperature. Either the component has a crack, or a surface mount item has come loose, so when everything expands when the system heats up, you get the failure.
Unplug any cd or blue ray players. See if your system runs without failing. This is not likely to be the problem, but it's worth a shot, and it's easy to check.
HDDs next, because they are easy.
Boot the system with just the HDD or just the SDD. See if it runs without failing. If the system fails with one of them plugged in, but not the other, you know where the problem is.
Now memory because it's not as easy as HDDs, but still pretty easy.
If you have multiple memory chips, and can run your system with just one of them, do that. Run your system ten minutes at a time with each of the memory chips in there. See if the system runs fine with all of them except one. If it runs fine with just one chip, and doesn't fail for any of them, put all the memory back in save one, leaving one of the previously occupied slots empty. The idea is to narrow down whether you have a bad memory chip or a bad memory slot. If the system fails no matter what you do with the memory, then it's probably not the memory or the memory slots.
The last step kind of sucks. You have to replace the mobo and see if it's the issue. The problem here is you have to get another one and see if it fixes the issue. You could also take your system to a trusted computer shop, and they can try a different mobo to see if it works.
Finally, be a bit leary of advice you get on any internet forum. Just because we sound like we know what we're talking about, doesn't mean we know what we're talking about.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Burn a Memtest86 CD on a working computer and see how that runs on the suspect computer. It takes an hour or two to run a complete scan - it runs from the CD (or thumb drive), so it's completely independant of your SSD/HD/Windows
Thanks for the various replies everyone. For those interested it seems the SSD was (somehow) causing all the problems, as completely removing the SSD from the system stopped all the problems and now everything seems to be working fine again.
I still don't understand why if it was a bad SSD that windows would boot up normally, run a demanding game at high settings just fine, or run notepad just fine for 10 minutes (no difference between the two) then freeze. And I still don't understand why booting up from a completely different physical drive would also freeze just because the SSD was connected. Maybe both WinXP and Win7 attempt to do some check of every HDD connected to the PC every 10 minutes and that made it crash, but that's just a wild and random guess.
Here's hoping Intel has a good warranty return policy, SSD is only 5 months old.