Hardware woes

[Miskatonic]

Here's my setup:

A7N8X Deluxe R 2.0
2500+ Barton
Powercolor 9600 Pro
Crucial 3200 333mhz 512mb
Maxtor Ultra Plus Diamondmax 7200 120gb 8mb cache (As of last week)
WD SE 120gb 7200 (Original drive, went south)
Maxtor 300gb HD
Antec 430w True Power
Lite on 52x CD-RW
NEC 3500A DVD-RW
USR 56k Winmodem

This computer in its original state ran flawlessly for over 2 years.

I'll give a little background over the last month as to what has been happening to my computer. I originally had a WD SE 120gb hard drive. Over the past month or so it has been making clicking noises. A couple weeks ago it started doing them sporatically, especially during boot up. It would speed up, slow down, click. Over and over. I finally RMA'd it and got a refurbished one with the same specs. I tried to load WinXP Pro on it, but got numerous errors during the installation. I tried to run check disk through the WinXP disc, and was told that the drive had unrecoverable errors. It would lock up randomly during installation of WinXP pro. I rma'd it as well and will be recieving a new hard drive soon.

I went out and bought the 120gb maxtor drive and installed WinXP Pro without a hitch. What I did notice though is that the first time I booted it up I heard one click and then it froze, no BSOD, the cursor just stuck in the middle of the screen, no mouse response. I hit restart and the computer booted up fine, everything worked. I shut it down through WinXP and started it back up to see what the deal was, once again it froze, so I hit restart and it booted up fine. It always booted up fine when restart is selected in WinXP.

As of yesterday it has been locking up at random times. Sometimes when the WinXP screen is running right before windows opens up, sometimes a couple minutes after windows has loaded and I'm doing whatever. One thing I have noticed is that it will lock up automatically if I select the partitioned drive (c: 10gb, M: the rest). I ran check disk on C:, no errors no problems. Ran it on M: and it locked up during the first setp. So I figured hey I have bad sectors or whatever. Well I hooked up my hard drive to another computer that is basically identical, besides a different brand of RAM (Kingston VR) and the check disk for M: ran great and reported no errors. WinXP worked fine and I could access files on M: no problem. So I started putting in parts from the computer that the HD worked on into my computer to check. I disconnected all peripherals besides the HD with XP on it. First I tried the different memory, nothing changed. Different video card, nothing changed.

So I've basically come to the conclusion that either the Motherboard or power supply is to blame.

I went in to BIOS and wrote down all the voltage and temps, I left the computer on for around 10 minutes before I wrote these down. So obviously the temps are cooler at start up.

Motherboard Temp 21-22C
CPU Temp 34-36C

Vcore 1.69-1.71v
+3.3V 3.29-3.36v
+5v 4.35-4.51v
+12v 12.16-12.22v

CPU Fan 3300-3500

I wrote the fluctuations from lowest to highest that I saw.

I appreciate any assistance that you guys can give me. This is driving me bonkers.

[PCBruiser]

If you heard a really sharp click, that is the "dreaded click of death" which happens when one of the flying heads in a hard drive suddenly stops flying and crashes on the hard drive platter. It is always a sign of a bad hard drive, and usually appears very shorly before the hard drive fails completely. RMA it - it is a new drive and new drives shouldn't have that kind of problem. It may have been dropped during shipment or damaged during manufacture. Even if it is not the problem, and I suspect it is, you never want to keep a drive that is clicking like that. BTW, you are going to tell me it worked on another system, right, so it can't be the drive. Nope, in the early stage, those clicks appear randomly, after the problem gets worse, they will happen more frequently until the drive stops working completely. Now if you do get an RMA and you are still having the problem, then I am wrong and it is something else - that's a possibility, but this is the more likely issue.

BTW, your 5v rail looks weak. I would consider a new PSU as well. The other voltages and temps look fine.

[SupDawg]

Yeah, what PCB said. I would suspect as well the 5volt rail as way too low. It should be hovering right around the 5.0 +- .07 volt. I know the hard drives runs from the 12v rail, but I forget what the 5 does. If my memory serves me correctly it has something to do with the motherboard.

So in short it could be a PSU or a motherboard problem. I would try a new PSU to see if that helps. If not, i would suspect that the motherboard is on the fritz.

[Miskatonic]

I swapped out the PS with an enermax 420w that was in another computer of mine and the +5v went up to 5.02-5.05 and no more clicking, no more freezing. So I guess I'll be RMA'ing the Antec PS.

Thanks for the help guys!

[SupDawg]

Originally Posted by Miskatonic

I swapped out the PS with an enermax 420w that was in another computer of mine and the +5v went up to 5.02-5.05 and no more clicking, no more freezing. So I guess I'll be RMA'ing the Antec PS.

Thanks for the help guys!

Good, hopefully, that solves your problem for good.