PCA Forums

I am running two maxtor 30 gig IDE drives in a non-raid setup where one has my OS and everything and the second is just used to store ghost images of the partitions on the other. My primary drive is either failing to start, or will start and quit the first time I boot up after my pc has been off for more than an hour. After one or two attempts to boot, it will run fine.

I have checked the power connections to it once and will do so again. My next thought is that my 300w ps has started to die or that the drive has started to die.

If anybody has any suggestions, I would be welcome to any thoughts or things that can be done to further diagnose the problem.

Well if its morning sickness, give it 9 months and you might get another hard drive out of it! You might even get lucky and get a RAID array (twins)! :lol Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Have you run the drive diagnostic utilities available from Maxtor yet? that's always a good place to start. You may also want to check your power management settings and make sure you don't have th drives set to power down after some period of time.

Heheh, twins... Geez, I crack myself up.

What error message does it post when it fails? It sounds vaugely like a connection expanding or contracting due to heat, but if it's only at boot it could be the timing on the MB v HD. A few times I've seen HD's that don't finish spinning up by the time the MB is ready to go.

This is very hard to diagnose. It is intermittent for sure. In one instance, my system did not boot and my mobo told me that no boot device was found. I rechecked the connections and this did not appear. I am still, however, getting intermittent BSOD's when windows starts and it is hard to tell if this is a hardware or software problem. It only occurs, however, when the system has been shut off for at least an hour.

I'd try a different PSU but to me either A the HDD is going or B the controller is going... I had the problem once and it was a dead hard drive...

Could be PSU but I tend to suspect the drive.

Definately download Maxtor's hard drive test utility and run that.

Try a different power supply connector on that drive.

Are you overclocking? If so, try setting your clock to normal and see if it clears up. Some drives/controllers can't handle an off-frequency PCI bus. It'll cause data corruption in the short term and drive damage in the long term.

The first thing I did was take the clocking down to stock speed. The second thing I did was make sure the power connector was tight. I will swap power connectors tonight and see if that makes a difference.

Problem apparently fixed. Found a mangled molex that had one pin backing out of the nylon holder....

hehe Sometimes its the most stupid thing once u get it figured out... And it always seems like it takes ya a day or 2 to figure it out then ya feel like an idiot...