Drives cutting out, new build

T

THRESHIN

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 29, 2002
Messages
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Just upgraded, have an odd issue. Carried all my old drives over from my old system, 850 evo 250 gb, wd 3tb,old wd 250 gb, and a LG blu ray burner. All are sata.

The evo and the 3tb wd seem to work right, but the other two drives are stalling. All drives worked right before the build.

Didn't discover it right away, I only use the 250 gb for music storage mostly. When playing an mp3, winamp (yes I still use that) will just freeze for a couple minutes and then pick up again. Turns out that the drives are not accessible. Toss a Cd into the LG and it's a similar story, both at the same time.

Any ideas? So far I've updated mobo bios and all drivers. No luck. Here's some specs

Gigabyte z170 mx gaming 5
i5 6600k
Asus gtx 970
16 gb ddr4
Corsair 650hx

And above drives
 
Which SATA ports are each of the SATA data cables plugged into? You have four SATA3 sockets arranged in a square (0, 1, 4, 5) and two off to the side (2, 3) and below them the SATA Express slots. Have you tried moving the stalling drives into other SATA ports? Are any of them in the SATA Express slots?
 
yes this is correct, i have two banks of sata ports on the mobo. lower bank contains 4x sata3 ports and a couple sata express (the smaller ones)

the upper bank has 2x sata 3 ports and a couple of the sata express ports. i do not have the correct cables for the smaller sata express ports.

i had two drives on the 2x upper ones (one was the evo) and the other drive and the optical on the lower. tried swapping them all to the 4x lower ones, didn't make a difference. well i kinda made it worse. once it started locking up, the entire system locked shortly after. reset button would not work, had to hold power button. then it wouldn't POST until i cut power entirely for a short time.

worth noting that i'm on win7 64-bit. i did not do a reinstall before swapping my new parts in - thought i might get away with just clearing drivers before swap and installing new ones after.

maybe time to try a format/reinstall?

i admit, i'm a little behind on the new techs. i'm not sure why i have two banks like this or what the difference between sata 3 and sata express is other than the plug is smaller. just want to explore all the options before declaring the board faulty. this build has been a shitshow so far...i'll make another post about that once i get past this problem. its been entertaining.

thanks for the help!
 
i'm starting to wonder if my old 250gb WD drive is just starting to die. the thing is very old, i think around 10-12 years! it certainly owes me nothing. maybe just the jostling around of the build did it in. next step i think i'll pull that drive and try some music playback from the newer 3TB. the system seems perfectly stable if i don't touch the old drive...might be taking out the entire bank of sata ports when it goes nuts.

any other ideas, please lay them on me!
 
I never trust carrying over an OS install to a new mobo, you can get all kinds of weird stuff.

Use a spare drive.... maybe that old WD 250GB drive and the optical drive and do a fresh
OS install and test it for a while with the two drives that were giving you fits. None of the others
connected yet until you are sure it's running right.

Once it's running ok, then do another fresh install onto the SSD or whatever your normal OS
drive is. Or if everything is ok on the test install, create a backup image of it to restore to your
normal OS drive.

It's a good idea to do a fresh OS install every so often anyway.

I just did one for my upgraded system (new mobo, CPU, RAM) and it goes fast. Once I get all of
the drivers and updates installed I do a Ghost image so I have a base image I can restore in case
something gets hosed. As long as I still have the same mobo, I can use that base image to get
up and running again quickly.
 
I would just take out the HDD that's 10 to 12 years old and see if that makes everything else behave.
 
evilsofa said:
I would just take out the HDD that's 10 to 12 years old and see if that makes everything else behave.
Click to expand...

Ok.... or that. :)

That is probably a good first step. The system could be getting hung up
on errors or retries on that drive.

I still say do a fresh OS install though.
 
Got an idea. Have an old boot Cd around somewhere with a bunch of diagnostic tools on it. Put the drive in question through a stress test. If there's a problem, it should fail and this takes windows out of the equation. I'll still disconnect it after to confirm.
 
couldn't get the tests to work (software is too old and won't recognize sata 3!) but just avoiding using this old drive entirely seems to be working....need to unplug it next for further testing with the optical, but its looking like a dud drive.

you guys gave my brain a kick and lead me to thinking about the drive being faulty, many thanks! been a while since i've had to diagnose any computer issues. i'll report back once i have this nailed down conclusively.
 
i've gone the extra mile here and put the drive in question into another system....works fine. the optical still seems to be acting a little quirky as well. the strange part is if i pull the driver via device manager and then 'scan for hardware changes' to reinstall, it seems to fix it...even if temporarily. even stranger, after it cuts out a couple times it'll start working just fine...

i'm thinking its time for the windows nuke.

my build is here if anyone is curious on the shitshow that it was :

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1042019829&posted=1#post1042019829
 
See if there is a firmware update for that optical drive. It may help if there is something going on with the drive vs. the controller on that mobo.
Of course be careful about possible disconnects during the update, you don't want to brick the drive. Maybe do it on another system if you can.
 
its a good idea, just one i've already thought of and done :p

didn't seem to help any. i'll be doing a format/reinstall tonight i think. if that doesn't help any, something is going on here like an odd hardware conflict
 
just wanted to say that i got this one solved, thanks guys.

it does appear that my 8 year old WD drive is just starting to fail...not surprises there. it runs around 54ºC according to crystal :/ no loss there, this thing has had its day. can't say i'll miss the 250GB it offers.

the windows reinstall did the trick. it was very painful with this new hardware using win7 (not quite ready to make the jump to 10) but i got it settled.

here's the interesting thing though....the SSD and the 3TB WD drive are both on SATA 3...the old 250 and my LG optical are on SATA 2....strange how those were the ones to give the problems while the SATA 3 drives were just fine. i wouldn't put it past the failing drive to have caused all this, but that doesn't matter now.
 
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