Azisien
10-02-2012, 04:47 PM
Trying to help diagnose a problem for a friend. His PC is almost the exact same build as mine, so it hits close to home when the little thing starts dying!
It's a gaming rig originally put together in 2009 but has a few upgrades.
Total of four hard drives, 2 SSDs in RAID0 as OS boot, and 2 separate storage drives (1TB and 3TB).
Symptoms:
- While playing Borderlands 2 with game + steam installed on the 1TB drive, the game suddenly crashed without error message. Steam crashes without error message and must be restarted. If torrents are running with the upload/download folder on that drive, they become "could not locate file" until re-checked.
- Everytime the above happens, the 3TB drive disappears entirely from Windows. It reappears after a reboot, and it is visible in BIOs/POST.
- Once, again while playing Borderlands 2, entire PC shut down and wouldn't even POST anymore after ~5 reboots and waiting. Waited about an hour and it booted up again, but the other problems persist.
- Tested using other applications, crash seems to occur on any resource intensive application (video editing, Guild Wars 2 [not associated with Steam), and happened once while idle too.
- Re-installed and moved Steam and all games to the 3TB drive, experienced similar issue where the 3TB drive disappears.
WOT I THINK (and recommendations I gave):
-The 3TB drive is new, about a month old. I don't know why it being faulty would mess up everything else when almost nothing is installed on it, but computers are wacky beasts. I have recommended he run ChkDsk on all hard drives and report results.
- Faulty SATA cable(s), or faulty PSU cable connecting all of the hard drives.
- As always, the PSU may be failing. Since it is The Thing That Fails 99% of the time.
- Worst of all, and my most feared possibility, faulty MOBO (out of warranty).
Thoughts, NPF techies?
It's a gaming rig originally put together in 2009 but has a few upgrades.
Total of four hard drives, 2 SSDs in RAID0 as OS boot, and 2 separate storage drives (1TB and 3TB).
Symptoms:
- While playing Borderlands 2 with game + steam installed on the 1TB drive, the game suddenly crashed without error message. Steam crashes without error message and must be restarted. If torrents are running with the upload/download folder on that drive, they become "could not locate file" until re-checked.
- Everytime the above happens, the 3TB drive disappears entirely from Windows. It reappears after a reboot, and it is visible in BIOs/POST.
- Once, again while playing Borderlands 2, entire PC shut down and wouldn't even POST anymore after ~5 reboots and waiting. Waited about an hour and it booted up again, but the other problems persist.
- Tested using other applications, crash seems to occur on any resource intensive application (video editing, Guild Wars 2 [not associated with Steam), and happened once while idle too.
- Re-installed and moved Steam and all games to the 3TB drive, experienced similar issue where the 3TB drive disappears.
WOT I THINK (and recommendations I gave):
-The 3TB drive is new, about a month old. I don't know why it being faulty would mess up everything else when almost nothing is installed on it, but computers are wacky beasts. I have recommended he run ChkDsk on all hard drives and report results.
- Faulty SATA cable(s), or faulty PSU cable connecting all of the hard drives.
- As always, the PSU may be failing. Since it is The Thing That Fails 99% of the time.
- Worst of all, and my most feared possibility, faulty MOBO (out of warranty).
Thoughts, NPF techies?