Hard driver or hard drive controller/northbridge?? : o

[h3%5kr3w]

Ok, so after a while of knocking my brain, I am thinking I either have an overheating chipset, or a failing hard drive...

Here's all my info...

Power Supply: Ultra 650 modular pwr supply

Motherboard: Asus M2N4 SLI mobo (NFORCE 500)

Proc: AMD 5600X2 (non-overclocked) Windsor 89Watt

Hard drive: WD 1T green

Video Card: MSI Nvidia 8600GTS

Memory: 2gigs Gskill PC2 6400

Ok.. So here's my issue...

Strange things started happening here and there where the pc would lock up. It used to happen just here and there, but then recently it started happening a lot, especially when under heavy all around load.

One day, windows conked... "could not read boot sector" or something of that nature..

Windows will install fine, and RUN fine before reboot (after fully installing and getting into windows, during the install process, the restart is just as it should be).

Upon reboot, it will only show the screen saying 'loading windows files' (windows 7) and then reboot in a loop.

Windows recovery always finds TONS of orphaned files, fixes them, and reboots to same issue.

hard drive never really gave any problems before. When doing a hdd scan, sometimes it will lock up, but when it does not lock up, it passes with flying colors.

SMART has NOT been tripped..

I got to touching the heatsink on my mtb and it was HOT! I mean hot as hell hot. but it does not seem to be loosed from the chipset.. Ran fine before hand. Unfortunately I do not have another computer to test the hdd with.

Runs off linux thumb drive/cd like a champ.

Passes memtest with flying colors

Also does same thing with 1 mem stick instead of two, also swapped to make sure one wasnt messed up.

Any suggestions?

What I have NOT done..

Put in an old ATA drive (I only have another sata drive that....shit... *epiphany* stopped being able to boot.. it was on the same mobo... Could my mobo be screwing up my drives?! Is that even possible over a given ammount of time?!)

Have not put a multimeter on my pwr supply (I dont have a multimeter nor can I afford one right now..)

Recent things I have done with my computer:

Tried using an old sound card that ended up not working... (but hdd was fine afterward, the issue started a week afterward)

ANY help is greatly appreciative.

[digip]

If all this happened after the use of that soundcard, then something since then must have changed, like loose drive cables, power connectors, cmos battery(most likely not though, would still boot and run, just with default bios settings and wrong system date/time) or even ESD damage to some component on the board. Could even be a faulty PSU, loose graphic card, but hard for anyone reading to know without access to the machine.

It could be any number of things, but if it works fine off a live disc without any issue(remove the hdd before testing to rule it out), then possibly is a bad hdd drive. Just my opinion though.

[CrystalMethod]

If all this happened after the use of that soundcard, then something since then must have changed, like loose drive cables, power connectors, cmos battery(most likely not though, would still boot and run, just with default bios settings and wrong system date/time) or even ESD damage to some component on the board. Could even be a faulty PSU, loose graphic card, but hard for anyone reading to know without access to the machine.

It could be any number of things, but if it works fine off a live disc without any issue(remove the hdd before testing to rule it out), then possibly is a bad hdd drive. Just my opinion though.

I'd run a diag on your HDD first. Might be new, but that doesn't mean it didn't slip through QC. Are you using the RTM Windows 7, or the RC? I'd install another version of Windows, or a Linux distro, and test for stability. Run it for a few days and see if it exibits any of the same problems. One thing I would swap out right away or test (if you have the equipment) is your power supply.

[h3%5kr3w]

Strangely enough it's all good now??? I have no idea why. I connected my old drive (which would not boot properly) while I was at it, I reconnected the lights for the front of my case for glowy happiness, and I installed windows on that drive (same ver. same disk)... Ran perfect, couple of installs/driver/software/etc/etc/etc and restart after restart worked perfectly..

SO. I booted with a thumb drive into ubuntu, backed up everything off my newer drive onto the one I just reinstalled windows to (which completely filled it up btw, 320gig drive, 270 gigs off my 500gig partition :P)

Cleaned off all partitions, repartitioned, reformatted, reloaded, updated, installed, restarted, WORKS WORKS WORKS..

Have no idea why that was happening.. I will say this though, when I was in linux, before I took off the backup partition, gparted said that there was some kind of a problem with that partition, and it WOULD NOT resize it or anything else besides deleting it till it was fixed?! but it wasnt even the primary, nor the boot partition. So I deleted the sucker.

Maybe just a software issue gone rhy?!

BTW, it's Windows 7 Professional (Full MSDN copy) w00t!

AlSO, stupid as it was (yeah I am stupid), I reinserted that sound card that didn't work before... It works great now..

[CrystalMethod]

That really is odd. Mind you my system did something simmilar with the RC. Completely borked my XP installation, which was on two seperate drives in raid 0. I had previously thought it was something to do with it being the the RC and not the release, but now that you had a simmilar problem, it makes me wonder if it is a problem with Win7 and the Nvidia controller chips.

[h3%5kr3w]

Possibly.. or maybe it has something to do with not having both partitions made by the windows 7 disk? Wish I would have experimented more before the full reload...

(the original set of partitions that were made BEFORE I even downloaded the full Win7 was made in gparted)