Installed a new 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 SATAII drive in my media centre PC last weekend, since when it has been badly playing up.
The drive replaced a 160GB Maxtor which was simply full up, so I swapped the drives over, taking it as an an opportunity to back everything up and do an OS reinstall which was long overdue
The partition and OS (XP) reinstall was completely painless onto the new drive, and I soon got everything back onto it, and had a working media centre again. The problem is, starting a couple of days in, and reoccurring every so often, the PC will hang, drive access light permanently on, and become completely unresponsive. If you power off and power on (the only option), it will refuse to reboot. Looking at the drive list in the BIOS, SATA0, the channel this new drive is plugged into shows as 'NONE' instead of SAMSUNGblahblahblah as it does normally.
The thing is, it fixes itself. If you power off, wait a few seconds, and power on, it will reappear in the list, the OS will boot, and everything is perfectly normal. Until the next time.
I've reseated both the SATA and power cables for the drive, which were literally unplugged from the old drive, and plugged into this, so unless I broke it unplugging it, I know the cable is good.
What do you reckon?
Cheers in advance
DP
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Need to know the pc or motherboard, but a 160gb to 1tb drive is a BIIIIIIIG jump, I reckon a BIOS issue with your motherboard.
A BIOS update might fix it if you can.
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Most likely to be a BIOS issue as Zero has pointed out if it is an old board you may already have the latest updates.
You really need to slave the drive to a more modern machine and run diagnostics on the drive.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Sat 22 Jan 11 at 11:43
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Thanks Zero.
It's a homebuild from about 2002 (with various more recent add ons) based around an ancient Socket 478 Gigabyte GA8IPE1000 motherboard with Intel 865PE chipset. It's pretty antiquated, but has always worked perfectly, until now. There's a second (500GB) SATA drive in there which I put in a couple of years ago and that seems OK.
Prompted by your suggestion, I checked the BIOS revision against the list on the Gigabyte website, and found it to be four revisions out of date. Just flashed it with the latest (worryingly, itself dated 2005), and rebooted. It's come up OK, but am leaving it on all day to see what happens.
There's nothing in the release notes for the various BIOS revisions about drive support, but I seem to remember in the various BIOS listings, something looked different next to the entry for the Samsung drive but it passed so quickly I can't remember what. I'm going to leave it on and see if it does it again.
Thanks for the suggestion. Will keep you posted.
Cheers
DP
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Have you checked that it was regconised it has the full 1TB drive? I know you will loose a lot during formatting but what does windows see the partiton as?
Are you using a SATA PCI card or are the SATA ports on the motherboard? Must have been very rare to have SATA ports back in 2002! It will also be SATA 1 I know they are backward comptable but you do get problems.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Sat 22 Jan 11 at 12:58
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Thanks also to Rattle. Sorry, our last posts crossed.
They're onboard SATA I ports (two of them). First time I'd ever seen SATA when I built it lol. It also has two IDE ports, of which I am just using one for the DVD/RW drive.
The system recognises the full capacity, so no issues there.
Well, 2 hrs up now and no problems. Another hour to go and it beats the record. Fingers crossed.
As I said, an old box, but with 2GB of RAM it's more than up to media centre duties. Runs XP and MediaPortal with no stress at all, and my capture card has hardware encoding so it doesn't rely on the CPU resources.
Just hope I can get past this issue.
Thanks both for your help! :-)
Last edited by: DP on Sat 22 Jan 11 at 13:18
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I thought my AMD X2 4200 setup was antique but again with 2GB of RAM it is still more than up to the job.
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I have seen a few tempting Intel i5/motherboard bundles recently, and toyed with upgrading, but I really can't see how it would be worth the cash. Quite happy with Windows XP at the moment, and MediaPortal provides an absolutely cracking media centre which is right up there with Microsoft's own Windows 7 media centre IMHO. Switch it on, boots to a nice menu screen, and you control it with an IR remote control. All our media on tap, complete with cover art, film synopses, IMDB links and so on. It does exactly what it needs to do.
I suspect the upgrade will be forced by either a serious hardware failure, or the need to migrate from XP when Microsoft eventually stop supporting it.
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Been running all day and no problems at all. The BIOS update seems to have done the trick.
Thank you both for your help! :-)
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Excelent, pleased for you.
Now the bad news. Some of the data that's been written during your issue, may, and I say may, be corrupt.
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For my tuppence worth - BIOS might have solved part of the problem - an upgrade to XP might also be needed.
In 10 years disks have groen from 40Gb on a desktop to 2Gb - XP used to have issues with disks bigger than say 120Gb and needed SP2 to see a 160Gb drive unless it had been partitioned into say 2 x 80Gb.
I have not looked at this for ages but it might still be relevant to disks of 1Tb
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New hard drive faulty, or something else? - Zero
