Four hardrives 4 months!
 

My nephew, age 14, has a computer which was custom built for gaming. It is not cutting edge, however, it was put together specifically for gaming. Anyway, over the last five months, this thing has been to the shop three times. All the shop did was replace the harddrive the first couple of times. The third time, they replaced the harddrive, motherboard, powersupply and all the cables. That was a month ago. Guess what I have on my bench right now? It's down again! All parties are collectively scratching our heads and so far, no one has figured this thing out. This time I opted to fix the thing myself, and have determined that it is a software issue. This is what is so strange. How could a software issue cause this problem? I of course suspect a virus since he does share software with friends. The difficult thing is that the harddrive is toasted and I am unable to load networking, which effectively rules out online virus checking. I know this description is somewhat nebulous, but, I really didn't want to post a novel.

Basic specs
AMD Athlon XP 2800 2.0 gHz
512 Mb memory
MSI KT6V motherboard MS-7021 Ver: 1
MSI Geforce FX5700 TD128
XP Home edition
CD, DVD, Floppy

Any shared experience would be helpful. Thanks.

I would put 50 dollars on the problem being a bad powersupply. Toasting that many comps is pretty telling about the powersupply.

Can you name the PS brand or measure the volts coming off each rail ?

weird, is the drive sitting on a huge magnet? what brand are the drives?

Have you ever swapped out the drive cables?

-SF

Yeah, it looks like a faulty powersupply. Post your powersupply brand and specifications and I'm pretty sure someone will be able to explain the info for you.

Does he by any chance have a temperature probe on the hard drive? For some crazy reason, everytime I've ever taped a temp probe to a hard drive, it's nearly destroyed it. It's happened with the probe taped both on top of and underneath the drive, and I have no idea what causes that. I'm also curious as to whether anyone else has ever had that problem.

Also, if you don't already use Western Digital hard drives, then now's the time to start.

dude, are you on some sort of UPS or surge protection?

if it ain't a bad power supply (which you said you replaced), then my money's on either a bad outlet that the computer's plugged into or something "electrical" in nature.

go to the hardware store and get a line meter just to test your outlets. i live in an apartment where 3 out of 4 outlets are improperly wired.

soopafreak brings up an excellent point. I had a client who had nothing but trouble, and as it turned out, the outlet that she had the computer plugged into was only putting out 75 volts. yeeesh.

Power supply is a very suspect cause here. You may want to look at flashing the Bios also. I have an IC7-max3 and had some issues with my drives, but a Bios Flash took care of that.
Good luck.

Thanks for the replies. We too suspected "dirty" power, however, that was ruled out as my brother, an electrician, checked the entire house out. No problems with power and all the proper precautions are in place.

I have flahsed the mainboard bios, affected chipsets, VGA bios and all the myriad drivers necessary.

The only clue that I have was a BSOD error: KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR
Having read many comments on this error I surmised that we are dealing with a file corruption problem, specifically, Windows' system files.

The frustrating thing is that the drive is corrupted badly enough that I cannot perform the necessary diagnostics.

The PC has been repaired (without replacing any hardware) and is working fine right now. I guess the real test will be to turn my nephew loose on the thing again.

When you brought it in the first few times, did they replace the drive because it was corrupted? Or was the disk actually damaged?

If you had something corrupting your disk, then you didn't necessarily have to replace it.

Also, what did you do repair it this time?

Did you reinstall Windows each time you got the computer back? If you haven't done so, back everything up and reinstall from scratch. Also, if they didn't upgrade the power supply when they replaced it, that still might be it. You still might not be getting enough power to all your components. Let us know the wattage and brand of the power supply, and any other hardware that's powered by it.

If that turns out OK, I guess I'd look around and see if there's anything in the environment affecting your computer. Then maybe I'd look into the motherboard again.

Do you know why they replaced the hard drive? Was it making odd noises?

The current power supply is:

RaidMax Model KY-450ATX

It is an ATX12v power supply, total output wattage is 350.

Although the computer store (small local outfit) has been very supportive, inasmuch that essentially all the hardware has been replaced free of charge, they have not done any diagnostics. They have simply replaced hardware.

I assume the hardware was replaced each time because it took less effort than diagnosing and repairing the PC. I agree with :sandeep: that the harddrives did not need to be replaced.

Time = Money

Having been unable to proceed with any virus checking or harddrive diagnostics; the failure of the XP Install repair utility and the failure of the System Restore Points facility, I gave up diagnostics and just fixed the damn thing.

Here's what I did to fix it:

1. Booted from the XP Install disk
2. Pressed F6 to load SATA drivers
3. Chose System Recovery
4. Replaced the boot sector
5. Replaced the master boot record
6. Deleted the partition (only one)
7. Created new partition
8. Formatted drive
9. Reinstalled windows
10. Spent way too much time updating MB BIOS, VGA BIOS, chipset drivers and assorted device drivers.

Bear in mind that there were multiple reboots and attempted system starts, reseating of cards, etc. between some of these steps. All in all, a very time consuming experience.

Wow. That "repair" shop is incompetent.

Obviously if components are randomly failing and you replace them and they CONTINUE failing... you don't need to replace them AGAIN.

Random Failure = POWER SUPPLY... almost always.
Especially if you replace the part and it still fails.

What you need to do is get a program like Motherboard Monitor and watch the voltage on the powersupply rails. Especially when the system is under heavy stress (like when playing a game).

There is no set range of tolerance that defines a PS as "bad", but if you are seeing significant variance along the 12V, 5V and 3.3V rails... replace the power supply, preferably with a larger one.

Make sure you get a PS big enough for all the parts of the system... if it's a gaming system I'm assuming it has a big video card like a Radeon 9500\9700\9800... those things instantly make your system need a very heavy duty powersupply.

Frankly, it may not be that your current powersupply is bad... just that it's being overdrawn. The topic of how to get the "right" size PS is a topic that one could write pages about, but it is always better to error on the side of overkill since PS's are fairly cheap components.

I'd like to point out that specifically the harddrive draws power from the 12V rail.

Other components that draw power from the 12V rail:
- Most Fans
- Floppy Drives
- Optical Drives
- High end video cards that require more power than the motherboard can provide through the AGP slot. (If theres a clear plastic molex connector on your video card... it uses the 12V rail.)

Even though you have a "350W power supply" (though 350W is more than average) it may be that there is not enough wattage specifically on the 12V rail to keep consistent power to all the components in the system.

I would suggest a bigger power supply. One form a reputable brand name. In all the machines that i have run gaming on I end up putting in bigger powers supplies and it has gotten rid of the random component faliure.

A question for further consideration:

Did this problem happen
* Forever.
That would indicate you need a larger PS, and there is probably nothing actually wrong with the current one (just that it can't support the system).

* Started slowly and gradualy became more frequent.
One of the clearest signs of a powersupply failing. Whenever someone describes a machine "that keeps getting worse" I always know to try it with a new PS.

I was getting similar problems a few years ago, and it turned out to be a bad mobo. But, you said you replaced that, so...

Im gonna have to throw in my chips with the PSU. If you have another one you can test it with, that always helps. Cannibalize one of out a working machine to test it with.

I concur with all who suspect the power supply. I'm going to replace it with a higher output model just to be on the safe side.

Does anyone have any manufacturers to recommend?

antec & enermax are the only 2 I'd spend my money on.

Just one point. You suspect it is a software problem, which brings up another point. Has the same copy of (pirated?) windows XP been installed on it every time?

I play by the rules. I buy my software. The same cannot be ruled out for my nephew, ergo, my suspicion of software. He's only fourteen, and I know that he and his friends exchange gaming software. Who knows if it's legit or not.

Exactly...

Oh...and if he's running a raid, make sure you don't have channels crossed on the sata drives...that will corrupt like nothing else.