Undetected HDD's, freeze ups

I've been getting intermittent problems with undetected hard drives at boot up. First it can't detect my primary HDD, when I choose to continue anyway it doesn't detect the secondary HDD.

I've also been getting intermittent freeze ups while in windows. So I checked the system event viewer and found several disk errors (ID 11) that I sent to M$ who gave me the info in the attachment.

I'm also getting an "atapi" error (ID 15) at the same time as the disk errors.

As suggested in the attachment I've already replaced the IDE cable. It hasn't fixed the problem.

So I'm thinking it's a problem with the IDE controller.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

TIA

Edit: Another thing that's happened is once at bootup 2 days ago I got a "CMOS/GPNV checksum bad" error.

Could be your IDE controller is bad. I fixed a computer last week with this same problem. Changed cables did not work, ended up slaving the cdrom to the harddrive, then it worked. Cleint was happy. ;)

Thanks photolady, so is a bad IDE controller unfixable? I don't mind replacing the MB if I'm confident it'll fix the problem.

A bad IDE controller can only be fixed by replacing the motherboard as the original is soldered in, you can't just replace the controller.

Edit: your edit you posted relates to bad motherboard battery. If I were you, I'd replace that before replacing the motherboard. As your problems could be stemming from the bad battery also.

photolady, yeah I know that's a bad battery symptom however I've replaced the battery 3 times in the last nearly 2 years. I'm starting to think that my battery problems are really MB problems.

There's been a couple of other issues/problems with this MB. For instance when it was about 1 year old the sound went out.

So I've been looking for an excuse to replace it. :D

How do you like your MB? My local shop is indicating that they've got one in stock on their website.

Well, if you need an excuse to get a new motherboard, then I'll tell you, this is the excuse you needed. ;)

I love Gigabyte boards. They are one of the best out there and are easy to setup as their front panel pins are color coded. They are reliable boards. The one in my sig is the third one I've had only because I sold the other computers that had them installed, not because they went bad. One computer I sold last year was 5 years old and still going stronge.

Oh and some advice if you do not get the Gigabyte board. Stay away from ECS and PCCHIPS boards. The three most popular are Asus, MSI and Gigabyte.

Quote:

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Originally posted by photolady
Well, if you need an excuse to get a new motherboard, then I'll tell you, this is the excuse you needed. ;)

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Just got back from the store. It appears that I let the sales guy talk me into a Gigabyte K8N Athlon 64 motherboard and an Athlon 64 2800+ processor.

w00t!!

Well, all I can say is.......he is a good salesman if he talked you into this. I hope you'll be happy with it. ;) I ran over to Gigabyte and had a look at this board. Was your other memory DDR also? I hope so. It does look like a nice board although I am not to hot on the Nforce chipsets.

photolady, the problem was that my XP 2000+ processor was model 6 which according to AMD isn't supported by any easily available MB's. Newegg, ZipZoomFly and my local shop didn't carry any MB's that were compatible.

So I thought I'd get a faster CPU with a new MB. I wanted an XP 2800+ or 3000+. However the XP 2800+ was the same price as the 64 2800+ that I bought.

Got it all together and it's running well. I've got a problem with CPU temps but I'm going to start another thread for that.

I am surprised Newegg didn't carry at least a Gigabtye board to use the XP 2000 on. But stranger things have happened.

yep, I replied to your other thread too. :D

There's 3 models of the XP 2000+ included on the AMD motherboard compatability page, models 6, 8 and 10.

I had model 6.

Model 6 must be a dinosaur because no one wants to carry MB's for it. Models 8 and 10 had a few MB's available and several of the same MB's support both of the CPU's. If I had either of those last two models I would have just replaced the MB.

So it was obvious that I was at the tail end of the compatability cycle.

It was time to get a little closer to the front of the line. :)

photolady, turns out my original problem was a bad Molex connector to my slave drive. So the slave was intermittently losing power and shutting down.

My master drive is a WD so that when the slave shuts down the BIOS can't detect either drive. Whoops!

That'll freeze it!...lol

I switched to a Molex that hadn't been used before and haven't had any problems since.