Possible IO / Hard Disk Drive / Motherboard Issue

[Jonny M]

I bring to you a problem which has been occuring on and off for the past few weeks, and which is very intermittent and difficult to pin down. I first attributed it to heat, but I can have a fan blowing over the passive heatsink and have no issues, or be operating the same machine with no additional cooling in the middle of a heatwave (last week) and not have any problems.

The symptom is the stuttering of audio or the hardware drawn mouse cursor not following the mouse (mousover links activate and the cursor fails to move). This stuttering will get worse and worse over the course of one minute and the machine will reboot. On reboot it cannot detect the hard disk drive, but I can power it down and leave it and it will sometimes be fine. It does this whether I use 32bit transfer mode or not for the hard drive, which shows as an IDE device due to the strange way Asus implement SATA on my motherboard.

My specs are as follows:

Asus P5LD2-VM
Intel Pentium D 830
Maxtor DiamondMax 9 160GB SATA hard disk drive
2x 512MB Crucial RAM (MemTest comes back clean)

I am totally confused by what is causing this, and don't want to send the board back to Scan only for it to come back NFF. I have no problem buying a new hard drive if somebody has evidence that Maxtor drives don't like these boards, or that it may be the drive. However, when it works fine, it works fine - no clicking, MaxBlast comes back 100%, and SMART doesn't report anything out of the ordinary. Access times and speed also seem totally normal.

Anyone got any ideas?

[Jonny M]

My event log is full of:

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort2, did not respond within the timeout period.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

A parity error was detected on \Device\Ide\IdePort2.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

[dave87]

have you tried using something like speedfan, and getting a more detailed smart report? That shows up errors that the manufacturers ones often dont.....

[Jonny M]

Yes I used a program which checks the drive and it came back fine. I guarantee you that this isn't an issue with the drive. It has been suggested that these chipsets just don't like the older Maxtor drives, but nothing has been said officially by either party.

[Paul Adams]

"On reboot it cannot detect the hard disk drive, but I can power it down and leave it and it will sometimes be fine."
This definitely implies it's not a software/driver configuration issue.

I would start by checking the BIOS and chipset drivers for updates or known issues

The board appears to have 4 SATA ports, have you tried it in another?
Tried another SATA cable, or power connector?

Do you use the onboard IDE port?
If not, try disabling it in the BIOS to see if there is a problem when both SATA and IDE are used at the same time.

Are the errors always reported on \Device\Harddisk0\D, and do they always occur in pairs?

I'm assuminng this is a single disk, paritioned into C: And D:, which would imply that the channel to the device (not partition) is unresponsive.

If Windows loses access to its boot drive it will show the symptoms you describe - kernel mode time increases as I/O requests start to queue up, user mode processes get starved of CPU time and lower-priority kernel events (such as audio and mouse cursor updates) will get less attention and start to stutter.

Eventually a paging or file operation will try to get some data from the disk that it needs to continue, and depending on what issued the request and how it handles timeouts, it could hang the app/OS or crash.
If you yank the cable to the boot disk while Windows is running you'll see it do the same thing.

Asus' website times out here when I try to get the user manual, but is there a BIOS option for presenting SATA devices as IDE devices that you can toggle?

[ash_rm]

That's some good advice above.

I've heard of certain maxtor drives having problems with DFI nForce4 boards before. I think maxtor actually released firmware updates for their drives which apparently solved the issues people were having.

Has this problem been happening since you set up this computer? Have you got a spare sata drive preferably of a different make? Just to isolate the problem as being with the maxtor.

Have you tried updating the bios to the latest version?

[nimbu]

As suggested, try changing the cable. Sometimes the ones you get with motherboards are really really shoddy quality.

[Couger]

hmm similar to situation im having with a friends laptop ill post if anything i find might help you

[Jonny M]

Asus' website times out here when I try to get the user manual, but is there a BIOS option for presenting SATA devices as IDE devices that you can toggle?

That's the strange thing, there isn't. It even says in the manual that the only options are to present SATA devices as IDE. Which is crazy.

I've tried all the other stuff as well

[shaithis]

Its the same symtoms and even the same errorlog messages as a freind of mine had recently with his system.

His was the hard drive powering itself down intermitently.......and it was a Maxtor but on an NF4 board. Scan replaced the hard drive.

Do you find that sometimes when you turn the PC on from cold that it doesn't find the hard drive?

[Jonny M]

Yes I do get that. I'm pretty sure it's the hard drive as well, but I want to purchase my new one from Scan on the proviso that if it doesn't help I can send the drive back. Just waiting to hear back from them now.