Motherboard or Hard Drive problem.....

R

Rahburt-33

Gawd
Joined
Mar 17, 2008
Messages
763
I've got a huge problem going right now, and I don't know which part is broken. Basically, whenever I try running a 3D game, or do anything that is somewhat hard drive intensive, or even just hardware intensive in general, I'll get either a blue screen or just a black screen. (The blue screen does not mention any drivers, except for once when it said NTFS.sys) So I'll restart the computer. Well, it get's a black screen and I have to wait 10-15 minutes before it will show the POST screen. I have everything set to normal clock speeds, and I have attempted removing un-necessary parts (even the hard drive itself), and the computer just refuses to start. But if I wait 15 minutes, it will work again. The motherboard is Biostar TA890GXB HD (I'm starting to regret accepting this motherboard) and the hard drive is an older Maxtor 120 gb Sata. (I don't really use my internal hard drive that much, mostly rely on external.) I've seen all sorts of problems before, but I really have no idea where to start on this one, since I don't have a spare Sata hard drive to diagnose with. I'd like to only replace one part, since I'm starting school in the Fall and plan on getting a netbook for school. Also, if I have to replace my mobo, are the current AM3+ socket boards worth buying?

So does anybody have any input as to what's causing all of this? All help right now would be greatly appreciated.
 
If it's taking forever to auto detect the drive, chances are the drive is going. especially if it's an old drive, say 3+ years old.

But as with most computer problems, having spares is the only way to completely troubleshoot a problem.
 
Can you test the hard drive in another PC?

yes the current AM3+ mobos are worth buying.
 
I need some DDR2 ram to get another pc running that will load the sata drive. As for SMART, It says something about it but it boots to fast, so I'll have to double check on that one. Also, sometimes the computer runs just fine (like it is right now). I'm curious as to whether or not just putting it in sleep mode rather than shutting it down will make it act stupid when I turn it on again. I'll be trying this soon, it would make a good temporary fix.
 
How did you rule out the psu? That seems to be the first thing I would check in your circumstance. True, it could be the motherboard, but here is why I would not say hd-

When your computer first boots up, you will see the the initial start of the POST. You should be able to see the screen, and THEN it starts looking for attached drives. If the post does not find a drive, it will time out, but still be displaying an image on the screen (and then report- can't find bootable media, etc etc).

For now, can you do a few things?

Download memtest86-
http://www.memtest86.com/
and run that overnight.

Then download gparted-
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
and burn to a cd (its a live cd).
Boot into gparted, its a gui. Run the short and long tests and see what it says.
 
I'm ruling out that it isn't the PSU because I just bought a new one. The computer has been working fine lately, but I'm still gonna run these stress tests on it.
 
Is this the rig in your sig? Have you set all the clocks back to default?
 
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