Motherboard killing my Hard Drives

"Paul" wrote in message
...
Ian Field wrote:


"Paul" wrote in message
...
wrote:
Over the last several days I lost the ability to boot from three hard
drives. When one went down I plugged in another only to have it follow
suit.

The following is the screen I get when I power on the PC.

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...ps181ee5ed.jpg

Obviously there is an issue with the motherboard because one can only
give coincidence so much credit.

Each time it's happened was on "power up" after a previously successful
"power off". So it wasn't as if the PC crashed beforehand or exhibited
any unusual behavior to signify that the next boot up attempt would
fail.

Can anyone tell me what the possible problems is and a solution so this
system doesn't do the same to the fourth drive I just plugged in?

Thanks.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

Well, don't run any more drives on that system,
until you figure it out :-)

*******

I would take the dead drive, to a computer known not to be
killing drives, and test it there.

To protect that computer against damage, I might insert
a PCI IDE card in it, install a driver for the PCI IDE
card, then connect the suspect drive to the PCI IDE card.


Not all IDE interfaces are the same - especially plug in ones.

I recently added an IDE expansion to a MOBO that didn't have any IDE
headers, it wouldn't recognise the drives I'd taken from the previous
MOBO without a re-format.

Pretty lucky I'd backed them up!

If the original controller was RAID capable, and the driver
writes metadata to suit itself, that can affect interoperability.

RAID controllers have three choices, for a JBOD disk.

1) Use no metadata for JBOD, only add metadata when the
user builds an array.
2) Put metadata up near the end of the disk, then trim down
the declared size of the disk, so the metadata cannot get
overwritten (for as long as the drive resides on the RAID
controller port at least).
3) Put metadata up near the beginning. [Insert your own recipe
as to how this is possible - offset all accesses by 64KB etc.]

I moved an IDE drive, from a Promise controller (378???) to
the Southbridge, and the first partition would disappear. I
suspect this had something to do with metadata, but at the time,
didn't investigate the details. The partition would reappear,
when the drive was put back on the original controller.

I have investigated on another RAID capable setup, and on that
one, about 5MB of space is reserved down near the end, and 64KB of
metadata is written somewhere in the middle of it. I zeroed
the entire drive beforehand, so I could find that 64KB chunk.
And inside the 64KB chunk, was sufficient room to describe
up to 16 RAID arrays. (Data pattern repeated every 4KB, suggesting
each 4KB block described one array.)

So RAID metadata might have had something to do with it.

The previous MOBO wasn't RAID capable but the add on card I put in the MOBO
with no IDE header was.

An IDE + SATA RAID capable add in card I bought since then is compatible
with both IDE & SATA drives formatted on the old MOBO.

On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:07:44 +0100, Mike Tomlinson
wrote:

En el artículo ,
escribió:

Can anyone tell me what the possible problems is

It's the power supply. Motherboards don't kill hard drives.

It happened to me with a *LAPTOP* hard drive in the IDE era--the power
comes along with the data from the motherboard. The board would post
to the point of saying it couldn't find the OS. Neither drive ever
worked again even when connected to another machine.

En el artículo , Ian Field gangprobing.
escribió:

Making such a sweeping generalisation isn't too smart.

I's the most likely cause, based on my 27 years experience of PC repair,
but thank you for your condescension.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

On 24.4.2013 1:07, wrote:
Over the last several days I lost the ability to boot from three hard drives. When one went down I plugged in another only to have it follow suit.

The following is the screen I get when I power on the PC.

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...ps181ee5ed.jpg

Obviously there is an issue with the motherboard because one can only give coincidence so much credit.

Each time it's happened was on "power up" after a previously successful "power off". So it wasn't as if the PC crashed beforehand or exhibited any unusual behavior to signify that the next boot up attempt would fail.

Can anyone tell me what the possible problems is and a solution so this system doesn't do the same to the fourth drive I just plugged in?

Thanks.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.


For some strange reason, you're trying to boot from the network, not
from internal disks..

I don't have a second computer, so I can't check how one disabled that
function in the BIOS


--
-----------------------------------------------------
Thomas Wendell
Helsinki, Finland
Translation to/from FI/SWE not always accurate
-----------------------------------------------------

tumppiw wrote:
On 24.4.2013 1:07, wrote:
Over the last several days I lost the ability to boot from three hard
drives. When one went down I plugged in another only to have it follow
suit.

The following is the screen I get when I power on the PC.

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...ps181ee5ed.jpg


Obviously there is an issue with the motherboard because one can only
give coincidence so much credit.

Each time it's happened was on "power up" after a previously
successful "power off". So it wasn't as if the PC crashed beforehand
or exhibited any unusual behavior to signify that the next boot up
attempt would fail.

Can anyone tell me what the possible problems is and a solution so
this system doesn't do the same to the fourth drive I just plugged in?

Thanks.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.


For some strange reason, you're trying to boot from the network, not
from internal disks..

I don't have a second computer, so I can't check how one disabled that
function in the BIOS

PXE boot code typically runs, if a disk cannot be found.

On a good BIOS, you can go into the hardware setup, and
disable the boot ROM for the NIC, and stop those messages
from appearing.

The "disk boot failure", means that none of the devices
in the boot order, were located.

Paul

"Loren Pechtel" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:07:44 +0100, Mike Tomlinson
wrote:

En el artículo ,
escribió:

Can anyone tell me what the possible problems is

It's the power supply. Motherboards don't kill hard drives.

It happened to me with a *LAPTOP* hard drive in the IDE era--the power
comes along with the data from the motherboard. The board would post
to the point of saying it couldn't find the OS. Neither drive ever
worked again even when connected to another machine.

I had better luck with a Next brand computer I found in the bin room at the
flats.

It was a pedestal flat screen with a single PCB - including the PSU. The PSU
had obviously suffered a catastrophic failure - there were bulged
electrolytics both in the PSU section and distributed on the rest of the
board.

I'm still using the pair of 1Gb memory sticks and the 250Gb HDD, after I
harvested some of the useful SMDs I put the remains back where I found it.

On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:57:07 -0400, Paul wrote:

If the original controller was RAID capable, and the driver
writes metadata to suit itself, that can affect interoperability.

RAID controllers have three choices, for a JBOD disk.

1) Use no metadata for JBOD, only add metadata when the
user builds an array.
2) Put metadata up near the end of the disk, then trim down
the declared size of the disk, so the metadata cannot get
overwritten (for as long as the drive resides on the RAID
controller port at least).
3) Put metadata up near the beginning. [Insert your own recipe
as to how this is possible - offset all accesses by 64KB etc.]

I moved an IDE drive, from a Promise controller (378???) to
the Southbridge, and the first partition would disappear. I
suspect this had something to do with metadata, but at the time,
didn't investigate the details. The partition would reappear,
when the drive was put back on the original controller.

Yup, I've had the same thing happen. I pulled a drive out of an old
box where it was half of a RAID array--oops, I couldn't read it. I
had to put some bits in and fire up the old box to pull the file I
wanted.

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:10:44 +0100, "Ian Field"

I'm still using the pair of 1Gb memory sticks and the 250Gb HDD, after I
harvested some of the useful SMDs I put the remains back where I found it.

Worked with a guy with government connections. One year he got all
the old computers from an updated county budget. Hundreds. Would
have filled the floor space to average 2-bedroom home, half way to the
ceiling. Walked in on them cold, wandered around, even popped a
couple;- but when he told me to take what I want, I turned and walked
away without even a second look over my shoulder. (They either go
through greening/recycling, maybe at cost, although the other option
is through the community - churches, schools, organizations and
various projects for placement with children and suitable homes.)

There's just one rule for dealing with people with computers. Most
anything goes as long as I continue to enjoy them;- drudgery for
computer work isn't especially high among my priorities. (Know too
many people who want to act like they enjoy a computer, say they find
interesting programs inspiring, while all they're looking for is a
handy fix for working computer somebody will do for free. They really
do detest having to think through anything with a logical
proposition.) Reason why I repeatedly turned down opportunities with
IT.

On Apr 25, 1:28*pm, Loren Pechtel wrote:
Yup, I've had the same thing happen. *I pulled a drive out of an old
box where it was half of a RAID array--oops, I couldn't read it. *I
had to put some bits in and fire up the old box to pull the file I
wanted.

My suggestion on raid is to use the built in Windows 7 or Linux, OS
based raid, whenever possible.

Since the OS handles the raid, it means that if your machine crashes,
you can just pull the drive and put it into another box, and it will
be read like any other drive, with very little work. As long as you
stick with the same OS, or even an upgraded version of that OS, you
are good to go.

This is a lot better situation than a hardware raid, where you almost
always need compatible hardware to read the raid drives. And sometimes
compatible hardware is tough to find, as hardware companies are
upgrading their raid hardware on a yearly basis.
--
// T.Hsu

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:03:56 -0700 (PDT), Ting Hsu
wrote:

Since the OS handles the raid, it means that if your machine crashes,
you can just pull the drive and put it into another box, and it will
be read like any other drive, with very little work. As long as you
stick with the same OS, or even an upgraded version of that OS, you
are good to go.

This is a lot better situation than a hardware raid, where you almost
always need compatible hardware to read the raid drives. And sometimes
compatible hardware is tough to find, as hardware companies are
upgrading their raid hardware on a yearly basis.

Yup. The only reason I would use hardware raid is when the controller
actually implements it all in hardware. Software raid has the nasty
habit of faulting on a BSOD. This box is doggy for quite some time
after a BSOD while Windows rebuilds two Raid 1s.