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File Corruption From Motherboard controller?

M

Mistrblank

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 9, 2005
Messages
172
Hi, I've got a slightly older MSI 785GM-E65 that I built as part of a system in October '09. It runs a quad core AMD (Propus?) that I haven't overclocked. Originally I built the system with 2 OCZ SSDs (Agility 2), eventually adding a third (Agility 3). The system has always been just a game machine with one disk running the OS (Windows7 64-bit)and the others with the game data.

In all of the time since it was built I've intermittenly run into issues where file corruption pops up a month or two after installation. Most recently I managed to go 6 months without corruption and then it happened. I would be playing a game and it would just crash (usually loading something from the drive). If I went to steam to verify the game cache several files would fail and have to reload. I would get to a point where after the game reloaded from Steam, run the verify again and it would fail and start the download again. It would do this perpetually. Once or twice I've hit corruption on the boot drive and been unable to boot to windows.

I've tried the disks in RAID mode and AHCI and it doesn't seem to matter. I've followed all of the recommendations from OCZ to turn off file indexing and page file. I spent a lot of time focusing on the SSDs as a problem and bought the Agility 3 to try a different model, still had the problem. Recently I added a Raptor drive to the system and it too experienced the same problem with corruption. So what I'm left with now is that it's a motherboard issue.

Has anyone else experienced this? I can't find anyone having any problem with the same board or similar problems on a different board.
 
You could also have bad ram. Run memtest86+ on your system for at least 8 hours (longer is preferable).
 
The ram would be the main thing to check first, but you could have a board that is going bad. It could happen. I just bought an older used HP from craigslist that had problems, just for parts. It was an Nvidia chipset motherboard and it would not recognize any sata drives at all. I googled a bit and found that it was a common problem. The chipset got too hot and solder connections would deteriorate. In my case I just got a new board and reused the old parts. Luckily the board never took anything out as it was dying.
Of course you don't have an nvidia chip motherboard, but it could be a similar issue. Your board is a few years old now.
 
Both sata controllers and memory can cause data corruption when they go bad. More things can too, but these are the easy ones to remedy.

When a business runs into a ghost like this they will deal with it by sending a bunch of stuff away for rma or garbage, rather waste time trying to figure out where a bad circuit is. Be careful how much time and money you waste fixing an old worthless system. Something better is very inexpensive. Only slightly more than a new sata controller and new memory or new motherboard
 
Thanks for the tip on checking the memory. I'll give memtest+ a run through this weekend. I'm sure I ran an extended memtest when I built the system initially, but it might be worth it to run it again.

But having looked at this as a disk issue for so long, I never thought to think of Memory or CPU, now I'm wondering if this could be related to unlocking the locked out Cache on the Propus. I'm not sure if I have it enabled anymore as I thought I turned off all overclocking features and was running stock, but it is a possibility.

At this stage, just starting "fresh" may be the way to go. The board is old enough that I want to upgrade away to get to USB3.0 and SATA3. I don't know that the board is "going" bad, it's been like this since almost the beginning and not really getting any worse (it just gets worse over time from each reinstallation of the system).

At any rate, I definitely, really appreciate everyone's input.
 
Now I'm confused. What cpu is it? AMD Propus had no L3 cache that could be unlocked that I know of. The Propus was just a Deneb, but without the L3 cache.
There were one or two oddball cpus, one of them being an Athlon x2 5000 that was released in 2009 which was really a Deneb in disguise. Two cores and all the L3 were disabled. It was AM2+ only and had no working DDR3 memory controller. Details here: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K10/AMD-Athlon X2 5000+ - AD5000ODJ22GI (AD5000ODGIBOX).html
You could maybe unlock cores and the L3 on that one, but anytime you unlock things it may or may not work correctly.
You could try going back to the stock on whatever cpu you have and then see if it works well or not as a last attempt.
 
Run MemTest86+ for a while, lock anything on the AMD CPU that you previously unlocked. If that does not solve the issue, RMA all the SSDs. OCZ's forums were littered with complaints about their drives causing file corruption back when the Vertex/Agility 2's were out.
 
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