hard or soft error?

[kotatsuneko]

I'm running xp pro with sp1 installed one my self built deck, with the following setup

master - 80 gig wd hd

slaves (on a promise ata controller):

wd 250 gig
wd 200 gig

a few months back i had issues with this setup, as i got cyclic redundancy messages whilst copying some files from dvd to hd. after a while the slave drives would become unreadable.

so i sent the lot off to wd who sent them back "reconditioned" with no notes or anything. both slaves were bought this year, the master almost 2 years ago in japan.

I had a crash the other day, which led to a blue screen and an irq error message. since then windows is very slow indeed and behaves strangely ie, burning a dvd involves a 2 minute wait just for the lead in to start, copying 2 gigs of data takes 20 minutes instead of 1.5 etc.

its all very frustrating, i have 1.5 gigs of ram so know that isnt the issue.

after googling, it looks like the problem may be down to the crash, luckilly i have the video footage on dv tape still so no loss except time and hair.

would anyone know whether this is just bad luck with the software crashing or could these cyclic errors be down to a bad master disc?

i tried to do a repair to the installation today but couldnt quite figure what to do, just got a dos screen, bloody ms "manual" is a joke, i`m sure i have got repair to work in the past in xp, but cant recall whether it was from the dos prompt or not, any idea anyone?

should i just junk the master and get a new one? i`m at a bit of a loss really

[cstaylor]

Did you buy no-brand RAM? Sometimes that causes issues. Download the latest Gentoo 2004.3 LiveCD, write it to CD-R, boot it and choose "memtest86" at the LILO prompt. It will do a full memory test (takes a couple of hours) reporting any bad segments.

[FG Lurker]

Need more information on your hardware. What CPU and chipset are you running?

There were some very serious issues with some VIA southbridges and Promise IDE controllers a little while back. This sounds remarkably like that.

If you provide some more information on your setup I'll do my best to help you troubleshoot.

Ian

[Socratesabroad]

[NeoNecroNomiCron]

Ha ha you are using a pirate version of windows XP I know it.

I really do know it, really really do. You know its true too. How do I know? it dont matter because I know.

anyway it could be harddrive heat.

shitty Western Diatripe drives.. though not a bad as IBM hds(Hitachi Machi)

[kotatsuneko]

thanks for the help offers guys!

heres the specs:

mboard - aopen ax4gpro

cpu - p4 northwood 2.4 gig with 533 bus

ram - 3x pc2100 266 184 pin sticks of major (samsung) on 3rd

storage - on the initial post - all with 8meg buffers and are fan cooled

soundcard audigy pro

optical - pioneer 104 & 107

promise ata controller

lacie firewire 800 controller

all ide cables are tubular for increased air flow

psu is 300 watts

case is a new lian li tower

os is original win xp pro oem sp1 (as the 500 gig lacie drive needs patching b4 use with sp2)

pls note that i had the same cyclic redundancy messages when using the hds as ide slaves before i had the promise controller.

i have all data backed up. all drives are in warranty, i think wd just did a low level 4mat and shipped them back. i think the video fenky guy had a similar hassle, will contact him too.

oh and Neo, fyi i actually paid for 4 xp pro licences and 1 xp home Jpn licence. its a shame the one for this deck didnt even have sp1 integrated...

thanks for the info/advice

[FG Lurker]

I used to run a business custom building PCs. I've built 300 computers or so, perhaps more, and I've certainly worked on well over 1000. While this (definitely) does not mean that I know anywhere near everything, I have unfortunately seen my share of problems.

Over time most hard disk makers have had problems of one sort or another. Maxtor used to make terrible drives. Conner too. IBM had huge problems with their 75GXP drives and also some slightly less common problems with the 60GXP series. Fujitsu had a major issue a couple of years back and replaced 10s of thousands of drives. WD went through a stage of bad drives 5 or 6 years ago -- caused by a bad 3rd party chip, not by the drive mechanics themselves.

Seagate and Quantum have been reasonably good over the years. Quantum is now part of Maxtor. Seagate lives on.

Although most of the major makers have had various "issues" over the years, at the current time things are relatively stable, and reliability wise there is not a lot of difference between the makers. In my current box I run a 36GB WD Raptor for boot and two Seagate 200GB drives for data.

As I imagine you can guess by now, I don't agree with the "Brand X drives are all crap so replace them" lines of thinking. Many people have pet hates of various hardware brands, but one or two bad drives does not automatically make every other drive made by that company total crap.

Looking at your system specs, the first thing that jumps out at me is the rounded 80-pin IDE cables. Rounding 40-pin IDE cables is typically fine, and 34-pin floppy cables too. But 80-pin IDE cables are designed to have alternating data and ground wires to stop cross-talk between the data wires. Yes, every 2nd wire of an 80-pin cable is there solely to stop interference between the data wires on either side of it. If you round them you defeat this design and will be much more likely to get CRC errors and corrupted drives -- exactly the problems you are experiencing. It seems like such a simple thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if changing to flat cables solves the problem. If your cables are over 18"/45cm in length too that will compound things further. Have a look at this Dan's Data article: http://www.dansdata.com/rcables.htm. The article is grammatically a bit hard to read but it has some very good information in it.

Otherwise I don't see much wrong with your box. Sometimes a flaky power supply will kill drives or cause corruption. Is yours one from a brand known to make good PSes?

The only other thing that might do it is the XP install. I have seen situations where an older motherboard (especially with an older BIOS) does not properly support Windows' ACPI setup. Even the newest BIOS for an older motherboard might still be too old to have proper ACPI support in it. Using APM instead of ACPI makes these problems go away.

I hope this helps a bit... Good luck getting things sorted out.

Ian