Freezing after SATA drive install

S

Synful Serenity

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 4, 2004
Messages
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I added a 320g Barracuda recently, and for now it's just running as an extra drive. What I've noticed is that sometimes, Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer will suddenly stop responding, as if it's waiting for something. Thing is, I can open up a new instance of Windows Explorer, and those work fine. Except when I try to click the new SATA drive on Windows Explorer.....It also freezes up, as if it's waiting for something. When I reset the comp, everything is fine again.

I'm not sure if these are related, but I have my comp set to hibernate after a few hrs. When I woke up yesterday morning, I saw the comp was still on. I moved the mouse, the monitor turned on, and I saw that the computer had frozen on the "Preparing to Hibernate" screen. This is all only since installing the new drive. I can use it for hours it seems with no problems though. Wonder what's happening here?
 
have you run seagates program to determine if the drive is good?
 
I just ran it, but one area of clarification with Seatools - Is it normal for the hard drive to appear twice? My 120g main drive appears once, then the 320g appears twice, first under "BIOS Drive" and Unknown Controller, then once more as a Seagate drive with the Seagate model number. I have the option of selecting tests on "both" Seagates.
 
I have had a similar problem with my WD3200KS. It stopped after I turned off "show common tasks in folders". I have no idea why it did this, either.
 
Well I just ran the tests, and here's the results. The second entry for the drive, under "Other Seagate Drives" came out with no errors or bad sectors or anything, it's just fine. But the first entry under "BIOS Drive" gave the error "One or more errors were found in metadata file records"....followed by "Other errors found".

I ran Scandisk and chkdsk again just to be sure, they report nothing out of the ordinary. This program has me even more confused.
 
Ok , it seems that the errors above are a bug with Seatools and NTFS, as it reported the same errors on my other drive's NTFS partition, but not on the FAT32 one, and I researched and found that many others encountered the same thing.

However, I think I've found out how this intermittent freezing (and then crashing) is happening, but not why. I have the hard drives set to turn off after a specified amount of time in Power Management. To troubleshoot, I set it to turn off in 3 min, and after waiting for it to power down, I tried to access the drive, but it would not turn back on. Of course, this led to the freezing problem. So this is what is causing it: The drive is powering down as ordered, but not powering back on again. I can turn off power management for the hard drives in the meantime, but the question remains, why could this be happening?
 
Problem finally solved!! Turns out that the issue was with the DFI Ultra Infinity NF4 board. There was a BIOS update that said it fixed "Some USB device may cause to system hang up in post 50H"....This somehow mustve pertained to the drive as well.....After a brief WINFLASH scare (HELPFUL NOTE: If after flashing your DFI board the system doesn't post, hold the INSERT key on boot and it should work. In my case it was because the default settings initialized PCI video first, and not PCIe, so this BIOS "safe mode" allowed me to change it....I didn't know about this little trick and I almost gave up my board for dead), I tried the same test of setting the hard drives to turn off after a few min, and once they did, I was able to power them both back up again!

I wonder how many other people have had this particular problem and ended up RMAing their drives....I’m surprised I wasn’t able to find any more information about it. I hope someone experiencing the same problem is able to read about it here!
 
who knows how many, but if someone is having the same issue, you posted the result which helps us all :) good to see you found out the reason
 
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