Failing HDD or Bad SATA Controller

This is going to be a long post, so I apologize in advance. I'm trying to figure out if I have an issue with my 320GB Seagate 7200.10 or if its the SATA controller on my K8N mobo that is causing me problems.

I bought a Radeon X850 Pro and unlocked it and overclocked it to a Radeon X850 XT PE early in 2007. In most games, no artifacting occurred. However, when TF2 was released I noticed some mild artifacting occuring. It was livable as I was enjoying the faster framerates compared to the stock x850 Pro.

Anyways, in 2009 I started having random system lockups while playing TF2. The sound would go in a .5 second loop and I'd have to restart the computer in order for it to go away. This was usually once every month or two, and one time I left it frozen to see what would happen and I got an ATI VPU recover message. However, with the advent of L4D2 (and me becoming unemployed and having a lot more time to game), I got sick of the artifacting. So I flashed the videocard to an x850 XT (I used atitool to ensure I would get no artifacting at the speed of an XT).

I decided to use winflash as opposed to a DOS based BIOS flasher and it froze halfway into the flash. I soft restarted it, and it loaded Windows XP fine, however the ATI Catalyst Control Center gave me an error message stating that a compatible ATI card wasn't found. I tried to reflash it in Windows again and winflash said it couldn't erase the BIOS. This time, I turned off the computer for a brief period and turned it back on again. As you guessed it, the videocard was no longer working.

After doing a blindflash in DOS, I succesfully got the card working again. Windows XP loaded up, and the ATI CCC gave the same error message. I decided to uninstall and reinstall the ATI software, but halfway through the uninstall, Windows gave me a BSOD (didn't think of writing it down).

This is when the problems started happening. Once I restarted, Windows XP completely froze at varying parts. Sometimes it would hang at the loading screen, sometimes it would load properly and freeze before I could open any of my applications. I tried to access Windows XP using safe mode, and it would even hang. It got to the point where my computer stopped recognizing the SATA hard drive (it found my SATA DVD drive every time though). It would just sit at the POST trying to detect the primary SATA drive (the hard disk light stayed on). Also, sometimes I could hear the drive initialize, sometimes I couldnt. Eventually after about 10 - 15 minutes of either turning it off and on or leaving it off for a minute, it would detect the drive and boot (with Windows still hanging). At one point, I got into Windows XP without it hanging and I loaded up L4D2, however after a few minutes of playing the system rebooted and it had problems finding the drive again.

At this point I figured a format would probably be the best thing. I had just finished building my stepdad a new computer, so I backed my video, photos, etc. onto his harddrive, with no problems or errors at all.

I decided to try out Windows 7 as I wanted to see how it would run on my old Athlon 64 3400+ CPU compared to Windows Vista (which was slow). Everything went well, but I hated the fact that my FPS took a dive in the games I played, so I decided to install Windows XP back.

That was over a week ago, and everything was running fine until the past couple of days. A couple of days ago L4D2 froze and I had to restart the machine. Today, the system froze while loading a map. When it restarted, I got a corrupt .dll messsage that said to restore from a CD. I restarted again, and got a "Drive not ready, press ctrl-alt-del." message along with other boot error messages. After a few more restarts, I was back into Windows, however I noticed it was a bit sluggish). I checked the Even Viewer, and found the following errors:

• The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D.
• The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort2, did not respond within the timeout period.
• A parity error was detected on \Device\Ide\IdePort2.
• The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2.
• The driver has detected a device with old or out-of-date firmware. The device will not be used. (SOURCE: ATAPI)

As well as the following warnings:

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

I decided to run CHKDSK on my primary partition (Checking the secondary partition as I write this post). This is the report it generated:
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 716 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 716 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 716 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

204800392 KB total disk space.
29142128 KB in 63787 files.
21512 KB in 4295 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
177256 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
175459496 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
51200098 total allocation units on disk.
43864874 allocation units available on disk.

Since everything appeared to be ok, I decided to play L4D2. After about five minutes in a game, the system rebooted (like before) and I had a hell of a time trying to get back into Windows XP.

I installed Seagate's SeaTools for Windows and I have run half of the tests without any failures. I'm currently waiting for CHKDSK to finish scanning the second partition before finishing off the tests.

So does this sound like a failing harddrive or a bad SATA controller? I am using Microsoft drivers for the SATA controller. The system had worked flawless (minus the odd freezing while gaming) before the bad videocard BIOS flash.

Download the CD image of Hitachi Drive Fitness Test, burn the ISO file to a CD, and then boot from it, just like you would do with the XP/Vista install CD. Test the hard drive and see if any problems are found. DFT will run on most manufacturers' hard drives. Alternatively, you can use Seagate's SeaTools for DOS to test a Seagate or Maxtor drive.

Also, test the drive on another PC.

Finally, test the a different drive on your PC.

More cooling (fans?)
Larger PSU?
Underclock the CPU?

I was too tired last night and forgot to run the last SeaTools test (Long Generic). I am regretting that now as its taken atleast 5.5 hours and its only about 50% completed (Seagate said it can take anywhere from 2-4 hours). All other tests passed though.

As for cooling and the PSU, I am running an Antec TruePower 430watt PSU. For cooling, I have two Panaflo case fans (one intake and one exhaust). They are the "H" type and I think they are rated in the upper 30's of cfm of air. As for the CPU cooler, I have an Arcitc Cooler HSF and had positive reviews when it came out.

Just finished all tests using SeaTools and all tests passed. So what could be causing this problem?

So there is definatly something going on...

Once SeaTools was finished I rebooted and fired up L4D2. While joining a server, I noticed that it loaded the map a heck of a lot slower than normal. The slowness was roughly the same as before it crashed and gave me problems yesterday. I wasn't able to join the first game as I got the following message:
"You were stuck connecting for too long."

This message I have NEVER seen before. I joined a second server and noticed that for the first five to ten minutes of playing, the game would pause (with sound stuttering and lack of control) for about a second before it would play normally.

Any ideas?

I just ran HD Tach on the drive and I got an average read spead of 8.1MB/s with a burst speed of 8.6MB/s. CPU utilization was 99% with a random access time of 13.2ms.

Do these numbers seem really low? I am going to post a graph later on along with a comparison graph with this harddrive on another computer.

Doom4life said:

I just ran HD Tach on the drive and I got an average read spead of 8.1MB/s with a burst speed of 8.6MB/s. CPU utilization was 99% with a random access time of 13.2ms.

Do these numbers seem really low? I am going to post a graph later on along with a comparison graph with this harddrive on another computer.

Click to expand...

There is definitely something wrong there. Test the HD in a separate computer, or find another drive and test it in your current computer. My guess is that the disk itself is going bad, but testing both the SATA controller and HD will tell you for sure.

SicKlown42012 said:

There is definitely something wrong there. Test the HD in a separate computer, or find another drive and test it in your current computer. My guess is that the disk itself is going bad, but testing both the SATA controller and HD will tell you for sure.

Click to expand...

Yup, that was going to be my next thing. I am going to put the drive in an Athlon II X4 630 system, as I know it works with my drive acting as a slave. If the results are faster, I'm going to put the drive in my girlfriends system as its nearly identical to mine.

EDIT: I know the drive is still under warranty. Is it worth RMA'ing a 320GB drive when 640GB drives are around $80?

try a new cable

Yes it is still worth RMAing. Shipping doesn't cost that much and they might give you a larger drive if they no longer have ur drive in stock.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device

Ok so it looks like the SATA port is the culprit. I tested the harddrive on another computer and it was fine. I went back to my machine and tried a new SATA cable with no change at all. I then tried the other SATA port (occupied by my DVD burner) and the drive was working properly.

Here are the comparisons:

Above is using SATA Port #1


Above is using SATA Port #2

Its wierd how only one port is bad... but I guess it gives me an excuse to upgrade once I can get some money together.

Thats a chipset problem at its best!

It could be that the port has been downgraded from DMA to PIO transfers because of too many access errors. This would account for your painfully slow transfers and high CPU usage.

Unfortunately, this is something that is not very well documented with SATA. It was easy to fix with PATA (it was under the controller properties in Windows device manager), but I have no experience fixing this for SATA. You could try reinstalling your chipset drivers using the guide on this link, and see if that helps.

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?p=1452295

To re-enable the typical, or faster, transfer mode for an affected device:
1. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then click Computer Management.
2. Click System Tools, and then click Device Manager.
3. Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers node.
4. Double-click the controller for which you want to restore the typical DMA transfer mode (you want the SATA controller in this case).
5. Click the Driver tab.
6. Click Uninstall.
7. When the process completes, restart your computer. When Windows restarts, the hard disk controller is re-enumerated and the transfer mode is reset to the default value for each device that is connected to the controller.

Click to expand...

Warning: the access errors that caused this may be a one-time issue, or they may be permanent. If this happens again, you need to consider replacing the drive.