My PC has been running fine for the last few months at the speed and spec in me sig, but lately its been acting strange. Every now and then when I start/restart it, it gets stuck detecting IDE devices. If I clear the CMOS, and put all my settings back to how they were (thanks CMOS reloaded! ) it will then boot again. This is regardless of whether its OCed or not, hell, I even tried underclocking! Also I had huge problems reinstalling it again the other day, it kept locking up during the Windows XP loading screen which I couldn't get past. Even in safe mode. I'm thinking it might be my hard drive (300GB Maxtor Maxline III), but could do with some other suggestions as I have lots of stuff on there! I was going to test it with Powermax, but it doesn't support nForce4 SATA. Anyone know of any other utilities like this I could use? Thanks.
I'd try a different harddrive - to make sure that its not the harddrive, and also a different motherboard BIOS.
Thanks, didn't think about trying a different BIOS. Will do in a mo. Can't get my hands on a spare HDD atm, but will do over weekend and have a go.
Have tried the BIOS before the current one and so far have had no problems. Thanks TMM! Would still like to test my drive though as I'm a bit paranoid now. Software reccomendations?
I had a similar problem and my hard drive failed a week later. I think it would be a good idea to check it out just in case. I used the Western Digital Tester dealy to test my drives.
First backup your stuff. Then try replacing the IDE cable with fresh new ones. If that fails, try installing or booting with the most minimal set of hardware required. If that fails, it's probably the harddrive. I suspect it to be the IDE cable.
Here are the things to do: 1. Try to Change Ide Cable 2. Back up your files / Reinstall O.S. 3. Try to Reset your Bios 4. Get an extra hard drive
Still no problems, however that WD tester thingy said that support for >137GB drives wasn't fully enabled. Could be a contributing cause? Anyways is fully working now even through a benchmark pounding recently. Thanks for all your help.
Maxtore drive, correct? Go to the Maxtor site and download their utilities for that drive. The >137GB thing is a workaround for WinXPs inability to handle drives greater than that capacity matively, this is easily solved by breaking the drive into <137GB partitions.
I tried Maxtor's Powermax, but it can't use nForce4 SATA controllers, and I have no others. Atm its partitioned as 20GB, 100GB and 180GB (which is what it was originally) and all is peachy.
