Hard drives constantly spin down, computer freezes

R

rygy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 19, 2003
Messages
448
I am having a hell of a time getting Vista installed on a brand new WD 500GB SATA hard drive. When I almost get Windows loaded I will hear the hard drive spin down, then back up. Each time it does this the mouse freezes on screen.

I believe this problem is related to my previous problem. I had two other hard drives with Vista installed on them and they would have the HDD activity light go on solid then Windows would freeze requiring a restart.

I thought it was the hard drives starting to die so I bought a new one (I wanted one anyway) but it turns out I am having problems with it too. I am starting to really believe that the PSU is dying instead. It is an Enermax 350W PSU that is over 5 years old but it has been running fine in my Athlon XP system since I bought it.

I will replace it with a cheap PSU i have sitting around that I use for bench testing and see if it cures my problem. I know that the PSU isn't being overloaded as I have removed quite a few devices from the system that were originally powered by this Enermax PSU.

I am curious though, could it be something else failing? The motherboard perhaps? I'm not sure what else it could be.
 
Sounds to me like PS. Your not going to solve a bad PS problem by using another under powered Power Supply. ;)
 
Well I connected my bench-testing PSU and the computer runs fine. I won't be using this cheap-o one in my system permanently; I'll be buying a higher quality one.

Anyone have any recommendations for a new power supply? It is an Athlon XP system (Barton 3200+) with an NF7-S, 2 hard drives, CD-RW/DVD, BFG 6600 GT, Hauppauge Win-TV PVR 250 and 4 case fans. It's not going to need anything huge, I just want something that will be quiet and dependable. Once this system decides to quit permanently I will want to transfer the power supply to a new computer.
 
Keep us updated. I had the exact same problem with my system when I installed Vista and it wasn't the PSU since the machine runs flawless in XP (I also upgraded to a larger PSU since I had sold one from my other machine).
After Vista was installed, about every 5 minutes one of the hard drives would spin down and then spin back up and during that spin up/down time the mouse would be frozen. I don't know which drive(s) it was since there are 8 in the machine.

some one had mentioned that it was doing some indexing, but I don't know why it would cycle the drive.
 
From all my reading I have done I have decided that it is a power supply issue. I would have thought that it was a hard drive issue but there was no way two completely different hard drives would fail at the same time. By trying the system with a brand new hard drive and getting issues with it I knew it wasn't the other drives failing. Now that I have temporarily replaced my PSU and the problem is resolved I know that I need to replace it permanently.

I have also found out that because I have an older Athlon XP system the powersupply I need to buy will need to have at least 200W on the 3.3V and 5V rails. Most new power supplies don't concentrate on these rails and instead offer more current on the 12V rails. I won't need anything over 400W total either so at least I don't have to blow a lot of money on it.
 
Well I think I am finally on track to having this system up and running. It appears as though my failing power supply that was causing my hard drives to spin down and then back up again caused tons of bad sectors. I had to connect all the drives I had problems with to my other PC and check checkdisk on them. It was amazing the amount of errors that were found. I then formatted both my IDE drives and reinstalled Vista on one. I also repaired a lot of sectors on my media drive which is SATA. I now have two SATA drives connected (with files transferring between them) to my PC running Vista off the IDE drive.

I never thought that the PSU could cause that much headache with hard drives as it was failing.
 
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