My main PC has an Asus P5Q motherboard... a really nice one with many features and 6 SATAII ports ... In the 1st SATA port I had a 500GB Seagate HDD for boot. I began to notice some noises, like the heads continuously were trying to read/write a bad sector or something... Plus in windows log there were some "error in ideport0" , the 1st SATA port with the noisy HDD... So I downloaded Seagate tools for windows and did some tests on the drive, one of which failed.
No biggie I thought, it is just the HDD dying... so immediately it got replaced with a new 1TB drive, I did the migration with a program in Hiren's boot CD (can't remember which ATM) , there was no data loss or any problems, and the new drive just worked. But since this week something strange happened: when the pc was booted after a night's time , it would just stick forever in the loading bar of Vista, and the HDD light would light for 0.5 sec, and then again after 2 secs... this went on and on for a good 5 minutes, with no result whatsoever.
A reboot fixes the problem and windows boot fine, again with NO data loss , or damaged files! I decided to investigate more into this, so I took the pc to my workplace, cleaned it with compressed air :nod: and replaced the SATA1 port cable , that was indeed looking flacky (cheap china cable IMHO), with one of the cables that came with the ASUS mobo. I booted again , after ~10hrs being turned off, and it was perfect like before! I have tried booting several times in the day, all was good!
So I naturally thought , nice nice it was the cable! I went back home at afternoon, and booted once again fine! Then around 00:30 I decided to power-off the pc and go to bed. I pressed shutdown and went to wash my teeth... when I returned several minutes later I saw the pc was still working on the logging off screen (it was not hang, it never did that) and guess what: the HDD led was blinking like it did when it tried to boot.... irate:
WTF is going on? there is no freeze, no data loss, just annoying retries to access the HDD!
I know it is not good, anyone ever faced a similar problem? Next thing I will try it not to use the 1st SATA port anymore, maybe it is broken somehow... or is it a problem with the migration software I used to copy the boot partition from the 500GB HDD to the new 1TB one? :shrug: though I doubt this is the cause of the problem (the 500GB HDD works fine after testing on another downloader-pc in my office, that stays on 24/7)
The mobo still has a good 2 years guarantee , but if I give it back I must wait for it to be checked, which means no main pc for ~10+ days , maybe 2 weeks... not a big deal BUT it can be a waste of time too, since returns are always "difficult" , and the problem in question does not happen every time...
I am open to suggestions :grouphug: :thanks:
ps. I was considering migrating to a i7 machine, and now I see there are i5's available too? I got confused :ROTFLOL2: then I thought it again since getting new hardware seems a waste of money for now, considering I have an E8600 c2d@3.16ghz and a gigabyte 216cores GTX260 vga... plus the fact I don't really play games on pc nowdays, I prefer them on the X360 (unless diablo3 get released :jester: )
No biggie I thought, it is just the HDD dying... so immediately it got replaced with a new 1TB drive, I did the migration with a program in Hiren's boot CD (can't remember which ATM) , there was no data loss or any problems, and the new drive just worked. But since this week something strange happened: when the pc was booted after a night's time , it would just stick forever in the loading bar of Vista, and the HDD light would light for 0.5 sec, and then again after 2 secs... this went on and on for a good 5 minutes, with no result whatsoever.
A reboot fixes the problem and windows boot fine, again with NO data loss , or damaged files! I decided to investigate more into this, so I took the pc to my workplace, cleaned it with compressed air :nod: and replaced the SATA1 port cable , that was indeed looking flacky (cheap china cable IMHO), with one of the cables that came with the ASUS mobo. I booted again , after ~10hrs being turned off, and it was perfect like before! I have tried booting several times in the day, all was good!
So I naturally thought , nice nice it was the cable! I went back home at afternoon, and booted once again fine! Then around 00:30 I decided to power-off the pc and go to bed. I pressed shutdown and went to wash my teeth... when I returned several minutes later I saw the pc was still working on the logging off screen (it was not hang, it never did that) and guess what: the HDD led was blinking like it did when it tried to boot.... irate:
WTF is going on? there is no freeze, no data loss, just annoying retries to access the HDD!
I know it is not good, anyone ever faced a similar problem? Next thing I will try it not to use the 1st SATA port anymore, maybe it is broken somehow... or is it a problem with the migration software I used to copy the boot partition from the 500GB HDD to the new 1TB one? :shrug: though I doubt this is the cause of the problem (the 500GB HDD works fine after testing on another downloader-pc in my office, that stays on 24/7)
The mobo still has a good 2 years guarantee , but if I give it back I must wait for it to be checked, which means no main pc for ~10+ days , maybe 2 weeks... not a big deal BUT it can be a waste of time too, since returns are always "difficult" , and the problem in question does not happen every time...
I am open to suggestions :grouphug: :thanks:
ps. I was considering migrating to a i7 machine, and now I see there are i5's available too? I got confused :ROTFLOL2: then I thought it again since getting new hardware seems a waste of money for now, considering I have an E8600 c2d@3.16ghz and a gigabyte 216cores GTX260 vga... plus the fact I don't really play games on pc nowdays, I prefer them on the X360 (unless diablo3 get released :jester: )