ECS MOBO Hard Drive Keeps Rebooting

[bronxbubba]

I have a ECS Geforce610SM-M motherboard with a WD 320 gig SATA hard drive. I RMA my first drive (same drive) because of a rebooting problem and it failing WD diagnostics. I got my replacement drive and same problem. It took 5 tries to get Windows loaded. It wood reboot at inappropriate times during installation.

Once Windows XP is loaded any defrag will cause a reboot. I tried updating the ECS bios, switching my SATA power cable, loading VISTA, a different power outlet etc, re-seeding the SATA cable and running the SATA software update on the ECS disk.

What is odd is that during Web surfing the system is stable.

My next step is to scrap the ECS MOBO for another brand. Any suggestions on any other items to try are appreicated.

Thanks.

[Viper81]

It's always worth doing a few loops of memtest86+ when you have this kind of problem.
But it is worth saying that the drive you received for the RMA would probably be refurbished one itself and I have previously had to do 2 consecutive RMA's myself.
Is the new drive still failing the WD diag test?

[tomjkear]

ECS is known for poor quality boards. I am speaking from experience as well as word of mouth.

Would be worth your while to swap it out rather than going the run around trying to diagnose the problem. You may never get to the bottom of it!

[bronxbubba]

It passed the hard drive test doing WD diagnostics. Also had an old IDE drive lying around Windows installed perfectly.

My best guess is bad SATA contoller on MOBO. Tried both SATA connects. It is a drag to have to use a non-optimized drive.

May RMA the MOBO.

Thanks

[bronxbubba]

True. I built 4 machines on ECS MOBOs. Each were quirky, this is the worst yet.

[tomjkear]

True. I built 4 machines on ECS MOBOs. Each were quirky, this is the worst yet.

I made the same mistake myself a few years back and will never make it again. The issues were so random and inconsistent that it took me a long time to pinpoint the motherboard as being the problem all along.

[vhero]

i would say its a controller on the board myself a second RMA may work but it is most likely the board at fault