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?

(Sorry to copy this thread into here, but the motherboard was bought from scan, so I am hoping that they may be able to provide an insight into this issue)

[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.

[stu.artd]

Have you tried a different sata cable, sata socket on the motherboard and power connector into the HD ?

Worth a try.

[Jonny M]

Yes, yes, and yes

[stu.artd]

I suspected they might have been obvious things to try.

Looks like you're not alone with this one, you may well have found and read through the links I've attached
http://217.115.198.3/content/topic/12946/?o=0
http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forum...p/t-14861.html

[Jonny M]

Bump for the Scan crew. I don't mind buying a new hard drive if you say that will cure the issue, but I want to be able to return the drive if it doesn't. Otherwise I'll have to RMA the board seeing as it doesn't say it won't work properly with Maxtor drives.

[Chris P]

PM Sent

[Philipp]

Maxtor released a firmware update for there drives if i remember correctly this mainly solved problems with the NF4 it might be worth a try.

Regards

[Jonny M]

Any idea how I can get hold of this update?

[Agent]

Wish i had seen your post sooner Caged:
http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=69018

[Jonny M]

Cheers pal, I'll try this and see what happens. The issue is currently with Scan, like I said, I have no problems buying a nice new Seagate, but if that doesn't work I want to be able to RMA the board for a different model (one which doesn't emulate SATA as IDE).

[Jonny M]

Also: Why the hell are these updates nowhere to be found on the Maxtor website?

[Agent]

To stop muppets downloading them when they dont need them and screwing their drives up.
Its common with firmware for HD's.

[Jonny M]

Ok that doesn't work, says it cannot find a suitable device. I'm guessing this is down to the retarded way that my board emulates all SATA as IDE.

Now to wait for Scan to get back to me.

[Agent]

Make sure you only have the one drive pluged in.
Cant really think of anything else.

[Jonny M]

Yeah that's all that is plugged in. It can't detect it because the software just sees a generic IDE drive.