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Strange issue w/SATA drives

B

botreaper10

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 25, 2004
Messages
445
I've had this computer running for quite a while now. The most recent addition was an LG blu-ray drive for entertainment purposes. The drive works perfectly but seems to create a serious issue with my motherboard and I cannot figure out which is the culprit.

About 1 month after I installed the drive, the computer started taking 5-10 minutes to open files, programs, etc and while gaming I would experience 5-10 minute pauses. The mouse would still work, but nothing would be happening on screen whatsoever. During my initial troubleshooting phase I noticed that during the post, the SATA portion of the drive detection was taking a lot longer than normal. I figured one of my SATA hard drives was going bad. After unplugging the hard drive, the issue remained. So I swapped the hard drive back in and unplugged the blu-ray drive. Everything returned to normal.

I tried the drive with another SATA cable and on a different port and it wouldn't even get detected during the post. I sent the drive to LG for an RMA and they sent the drive back saying they were unable to reproduce the issue. I reinstalled the drive with yet another SATA cable and a different port and it worked perfectly. Another month goes by, and the initial issue seems to have returned. Unplugging the drive fixes any and all issues with loading programs or files.

Any ideas/suggestions are more than welcome.

Rig is:

Phenom 2 940 overclocked
ASRock K10N780SLIX3-WIFI
4GB Mushkin DDR2 1066 ram
EVGA GTX 285
Velociraptor 300
WD Caviar Black 1TB
LG Blu-ray drive, model GGC-H20L
 
It made no difference if a CD was in the drive or not. Usually, I would leave a game disc or movie in the drive. Everything is kept in its case when not in use so there isn't unnecessary damage on the actual discs.

The computer would act completely locked up aside from the mouse moving around still. After the 5-10 minute lockup, it would return to normal operation for a while, then repeat the entire process.
 
Hmm. Memtest86, run a couple hours with just one stick in, then a couple hours with just the other, see if there are any errors.

Try swapping out all your SATA cables if you have spares.

Other than that, don't know. Could be a RAM issue, could be a motherboard issue, could be a drive or cable issue. The above should help narrow things down a bit.
 
Don't take my word for it.. But is it possible the PS is overloading or the plug is loosy goosy? I had a CD Drive appear and disapear in windows a few times. I changed the power adapter and that fixed it...
 
I guess my biggest concern is whether or not the drive is burning out ports on my motherboard, the cables are going bad, or the ports are just shitty on the motherboard and crapping out with a small load on them.

I'll run the memtest and try to swap out all of my cables. I just don't get why it only happens with the blu-ray drive and starts acting up for no apparent reason. It never did this with my old dvd-rom.


Edit: I'm running an Antec 650 watt modular power supply that is maybe 2 years old. I've checked my power connectors/connections and they all seem to be making good contact. The drive is visible in windows, but sometimes it reads a disc as something entirely wrong. I had the avatar blu-ray movie in the drive and it was reading it as something entirely different. The disc worked fine prior to the first time it gave me issues and worked fine after the problem went away.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371010 is the power supply I have.
 
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Check the votages in Bios.. Are they way outta spec?? Just speculating. other then that I'm clueless.
 
Voltages are all within a few % of the desired voltage. Nothing glaringly off when it comes to system power.
 
Any errors in the Event Viewer?

LG hasn't had a firmware update for that drive since July 2008.

Make sure you have version 1.03......if you can find it. :)

Start with the Event Viewer.
 
evildobbi said:
Check the votages in Bios.. Are they way outta spec?? Just speculating. other then that I'm clueless.
Click to expand...

this is useless anyway because on board voltage sensors are usually entirely inaccurate. this doesnt sound like a voltage problem to me, it sounds more like a windows error or device conflict of some type, but that is just going with the gut. are you overclocked at all?
 
The only error I found in the Event Viewer was related to the hard disk controller:

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\DR2." which happened for a total of 5 entries, 2x times. Once was on the 4th and the other was on the 5th. I unplugged the Blu-ray drive on the 5th after the issues started happening again. The error hasn't happened again and did not happen prior to the 4th.


EDIT: I found a separate issue relating to the CD-rom.
"The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: cdrom"
This happened on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of January.
 
It's pretty obvious that DVD drive is one problem.

Maybe there's a BIOS update but other than that I'm outta ideas.
 
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