Two WD 10k HD failed!?

Kymera

I recently got my A8N32-SLI, AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+, 2gb Corsair RAM, 7900GTX, 2x Western Digital Raptor 150gb HDD (no raid) system up and running... or so I thought. After a few boot ups, my system drive started failing at the Windows XP screen (the one with the loading bar). I know this because I would hear a real audible click in the direction of the drives, then the bar would keep going and going and the system would not boot. It would start up to desktop fine when I rebooted the machine. Eventually I got a SMART error: "3rd Master Hard Disk: SMART status BAD, backup and replace."

Well, no biggie, I thought. Sometimes hard drives go bad. So I unplugged that drive, plugged in the other and reformatted it, and installed XP, thinking I could just RMA the dead one. Well I was in for a shock. After a few boots off of that drive, I'm getting the clicking and I'm stuck at boot. I'm afraid I'll also get a SMART error soon.

I checked the temperature of the drive with SmartFan, it read 27C. I'm not sure if that's good for the drive or not.

It doesn't seem logical that hard drives would be affected by anything other than internal defects, bad cables, or bad power. My 12V rail is just below 12V, 11.8 or something, which I know is more than fine. The audible clicking sound makes me believe that these drives are both defective, but I've never heard of two drives failing at once, let alone so close to each other.

I need to get this fixed ASAP as I am quite frustrated and have things I need to use this rig for in the coming weeks. I'll be happy to RMA the hard drives if the actual product is the problem, however, I want to make sure it is not something else.

Judas

i would say those drives ended up having a fault... either bad shipping on both or just a bad batch.. it happens.. unfortuneatly... i had 4 drives out of the box fail emediately..... took me awhile to figure it out.. thought my sata controller was screwing things up and felt scared to try yet another drive.. but low and behold.. a 5th drive worked fine... tried the other drives again with nothing... load everything up on the 5th again and then tried each yet again within windows.. they would be there but fail.... smart would say BAD as well...

Kymera

Ok, I just used WD's own diagnostic tool on the drive left connected. When I got the click at boot up and the bar just kept going, I let it sit there. It did eventually boot up after about 3 minutes. After that, I ran the diagnostic tool in Quick mode (which I'm assuming from what I've read, does a check for everything except bad sectors). I did this 10 times - all tests passed successfully (ie, SMART passed). Each time I tested, I also rebooted the computer to make sure I wasn't having any problems there either. So far so good, but I'm afraid it's just behaving good for me now, and something weird will happen later. Right now I'm just going to go to bed.

I got a mention though that the click and the long boot might not be HD related at all but just Windows being funky after the install, taking a long time to configure something. I would have agreed if I hadn't gotten that SMART error before but who knows.

Judas

WAIT


i thought you had a ASUS A8R32-mvp.. not Asus A8N32-SLI... my bad.

Your most likely runing into the Nvidia SATA controller issues alot of people are having troubles with but no one seems to be really aware off....

That board should have another SATA controller on it... plug into that and then see if you have any issues.....


Nvidia is "saposed" to be working on a fix for various SATA1/2 Incapabilities (most of which are SATA2 related)....and you may find a firmware update on WD website.. but be forwarned... i've yet to have any of the SATA2 drives i've got work at all on ANY of the nvidia Nforce SATA controllers....

I think you have a silicon image sata controller on that board.. plug into that... see what happens. (find the driver disk for it as well)

Judas

BTW.. look here for when i first encountered this issue... and where it lead me...

in the end, all the nforce boards i had wouldn't work with any of the sata2 drives i had..

How long does it take to NVraid...

and don't mind the RAID... it started out as raid cause i started out with SATA2 drives trying raid.. it oventually carried over to testing each drive seperately and failing as well.

Kymera

Fixed it. Here's how I did it.

Someone on the ASUS support forums said that the nForce 4 chipset has a bad time with a new hard drive feature called Command Queuing (NCQ). Turning this feature off in the Device Manager under the SATA controller resolved the issue of Windows not always booting properly.

It turns out I do have one defective hard drive. I will be RMAing that one but my system drive has now booted many times without a hitch, and has passed many SMART tests.

I thought I'd reply with this because this NCQ/nForce4 incompatibility is apparently a little known issue, that hopefully will be solved in the next couple chipset driver updates.

Judas

they hope... but nvidia hasn't released any information about it..


some drives still fail to boot up or be detected at all due to the proble on various nforce boards. So if they can get windows installed... it'll help. But if they can't get that far... .well... turns into a fairly serious issue fast