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LAN Party Forums => Support Group => Started by: {ShadowWX} on December 25, 2011, 09:25:55 PM
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Hey guys, I'm having a little problem here, and I don't really know how to explain it so I'll do the best I can not to be confusing. Just recently I started having trouble with my D drive. It started giving me a hard time with writing files to it, mostly just being slow as hell and once in a while throwing up an error saying something about not being able to communicate with the device. It's been progressively getting worse, lately my downloads have been failing when downloading to the D drive, I can download to my C drive without any problems so that's what I've been doing. Lately it will sit there and act like it has to load a million things when I try to access the drive, it just sits there with the loading bar going across the top of the screen.
Now the reason I have MOBO in the title is that in the Device Manager, under Other Devices, my Serial ATA Controller has a big yellow exclamation point next to it, and it's telling me that there is no driver for it. I've spent the last few days searching the internet for a driver or even an answer to my problem and haven't turned up much of anything. So now that I can't seem to figure it out myself I turn to my FITES Friendo's for assistance. I just want to know, is my hard drive going bad? Is my MOBO going out? Do I need to flash my BIOS? Is there a fix or am I SOL? Should I just put a bullet through the damn thing and start calling myself an Xbox fag? WTF?!?! I know you guys have more experience with this stuff than I do, so if you can't help me no one can.
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I've never had to load drivers for a sata controller. Even setting up a raid0 has always been pretty simple, even moreso with win7.
Honestly, it sounds like your drive is starting to kick the bucket. Like... poking it with a stick and seeing if the bucket will fall over. You can TRY flashing your bios as it's definitely a good idea, but the first thing to come to my mind is that the drive is going kaput.
First order of business should be to get your important files off that drive asap and to a backup drive/flash drive/home server. Then go from there. Then.... well... nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Keep in mind that hard drive prices are batCrap insane right now. What cost me $70 6 months (or so) ago would now run me $179.99. That's for a seagate 2tb on newegg. If you're looking to replace, try to find a 500gig/1tb drive that doesn't cost much or that you have laying around.
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What board do you got?
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Do you have any other sata channels available on the board? Try switching the drive to that. Are all the drives sata - including dvd drives? Try switching them around and see if you get the same results. If you can access the drive just fine on another channel then it's the board. If you still have issues with the same drive on a different channel then it's probably the drive. Do you have a Sata/IDE to USB cable? If you do use that to back the drive up somewhere else.
If worse comes to worst, bring the drive over my house. I have a Sata to USB and a 2tb drive I can back your drive up to temporarily until you get a new drive.
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x2 on what motherboard do you have...
Some recent Intel chipset motherboards had an issue where the SATA controller would die slowly, this sorta sounds like this (If it is then you are in luck as they were recalled). I would say with almost absolute certainty that this is a hardware fault, firmware and drivers are usually crappy from the get go, not months down the road.
The controller will contribute to poop performance, with the cost of hard drives due to the flooding it would be the first component I would replace. If you want to try testing spend a few bucks on a cheap sata controller card (<$10), if the issues go away then its the onboard controller, if they persist its the drive.
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I have the Asus P5N-T Deluxe which is the nvidia 780i chip set. Sean, I'll give switching channels a try. I have 2 HDD's that are SATA and my DVD drive is IDE. If it is the MOBO I don't think I'm ever going to get another ASUS board.
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yea i can't say im totally pleased with my Asus boards in the past. I've had 2 and one died. the other is still alive:) But then again i've had issues with abit boards too and i used to swear by those. before they went belly up that is!
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Out of all the asus boards that i've owned over the years, I've only had problems with maybe one or two. Those problems can probably be attributed to chance and circumstance. This one (sabertooth 990fx) for my 8-core is performing beautifully. NO problems. In fact, the only "problem" I have with my entire setup (other than not having the video card that I want) is how loud my fan gets when I'm playing a game that demands cpu power. Skyrim and BF3 make it spin HARD.
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Well I tried switching channels and that didn't change anything. I was trying to delete something off the drive today and got the error message again and wrote down the code and looked it up. Windows suggestion is to run chkdsk to scan all of the packets. Just finished scanning the C drive and it came back clean, tomorrow I'll scan the D drive. It's too late tonight to start that crap up.
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Well I tried switching channels and that didn't change anything.
So at least its the drive and not the board. Or if you were hoping the opposite....
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Well I tried switching channels and that didn't change anything.
So at least its the drive and not the board. Or if you were hoping the opposite....
Well I was kind of hoping it was the board so I could talk my way into an upgrade. LOL
Problem is if it truly is the drive that would be the second WD Caviar Black that's died on me, and this one isn't even a year old yet.
I ran the Chkdsk on the D drive today and it kept getting hung up at Verifying Usn Journal. Not sure what that means but it's really starting to piss me off. All of my movies, music, game installs, emulators etc. are on that drive. The first one that died was a WD Caviar Black 750GB and now my 1.5TB is acting stupid.
Now my C drive is a Seagate 500GB and that's where my OS, games, and apps are all installed. I'm telling you this because I've been getting little hiccups from it from time to time ever since this whole BS started. For example some programs will just randomly freeze for a few seconds for apparently no reason. I guess the best example of this is when FF will just lock up for 5 or 6 seconds out of nowhere, I'll just be scrolling down a page, lets say a thread on this forum, and all of the sudden FF will just stop, and after a few seconds it's back to normal. I don't know, I just thought a little more info might help clarify the situation, and this was happening both before and after switching channels.
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Well I tried switching channels and that didn't change anything.
So at least its the drive and not the board. Or if you were hoping the opposite....
Well I was kind of hoping it was the board so I could talk my way into an upgrade. LOL
Well, in that case...then it sounds like the board is bad...wink wink nudge nudge. :naughty:
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Crystal Disk Info will tell you if the drive is failing and, if so, which part specifically. Last drive I ran this on that was failing it told me the spin up time was very slow indicating the actual was starting to fail.
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html (http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html)
If you run chkdsk make sure you use the /r switch. Its a much more aggressive scan. If you run this from windows it will ask you if you want to run it the next time you start your computer.
I thought you said you couldnt find drivers. I dont remember after reading though the whole thread. Drivers for your board are here:
http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=P5N-T%20Deluxe&p=1&s=22&os=25&hashedid=64sh5AD8oYUq7Cp3 (http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=P5N-T%20Deluxe&p=1&s=22&os=25&hashedid=64sh5AD8oYUq7Cp3)
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Crystal Disk Info will tell you if the drive is failing and, if so, which part specifically. Last drive I ran this on that was failing it told me the spin up time was very slow indicating the actual was starting to fail.
[url]http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html[/url] ([url]http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html[/url])
If you run chkdsk make sure you use the /r switch. Its a much more aggressive scan. If you run this from windows it will ask you if you want to run it the next time you start your computer.
I thought you said you couldnt find drivers. I dont remember after reading though the whole thread. Drivers for your board are here:
[url]http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=P5N-T%20Deluxe&p=1&s=22&os=25&hashedid=64sh5AD8oYUq7Cp3[/url] ([url]http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=P5N-T%20Deluxe&p=1&s=22&os=25&hashedid=64sh5AD8oYUq7Cp3[/url])
Thanks for the link to crystal disk.
Yes I was using /r to scan.
Yes I found those before, I ran the SATA RAID driver installer and it didn't change anything. it still says no driver for SATA controller.
I think I'm just going to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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FINALLY! Someone is taking my advice! I am vindicated!
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UPDATE: After much trial and error, and errors, I was able to narrow it down to a bad platter. I was able to partition the HDD to quarantine the corrupt sectors and reformat the good area, so instead of having a 1.5TB I now have a 1TB with 500GB of unusable space. I figured out that it was somewhere in the last 500GB because every time I ran a formatting tool it would fail at exactly 73% complete. Thank goodness that it wasn't somewhere in the beginning of the device, that would have taken forever to tweak out. Thanks for all your help you guys. And a big thanks to Sully for the tools to help me figure this stupid thing out. Now I just have to save up and wait for HDD prices to drop to replace this piece of crap before it goes completely. Then I guess I'll have to deal with trying to get WD to replace it.