Can a new HDD CAUSE system instability (New Problem)?

[sgupta]

Hey all,

So I'm repairing a computer (Dell Inspiron 545 from 2009 or so) that had a bum hard drive. S.M.A.R.T. reported it was dying, and fortunately we were able to get the data off.

Replaced with with a WD Black 7200 RPM 1TB drive. The previous (failed) drive was a Samsung 640GB, also at 7200 RPM. I've tried both Windows 7 and the Dell drivers and Windows 10 with the default (Windows Update) drivers, and the issue remains the same...instability after a certain amount of time, up to a day, resulting in a blue screen. Otherwise, it works great...until that happens.

I've done 12 passes of Memtest 86+, the built in diagnostics, HD Tune hard drive diagnostics (which show the drive as perfect), and even several hours of HeavyLoad with no problem, but then it'll just crash idle. I've seen Memory Management errors as well as others (ACPI was one...there have been a few different ones at this point, some of which I was told about and haven't seen myself) I've also seen no signal to the monitor and it just hung.

The BIOS is fully updated. The BIOS SATA control is set to IDE mode; I may try RAID mode, but those are the only two choices available unfortunately.

I initially thought it was an issue with Windows 10 on this hardware (as it's not officially supported), but it's doing the same thing on a clean install of 7, and this was never an issue before the hard drive crash.

Is it possible this drive is somehow incompatible with this system, or is something else likely going on?

Thanks!

 

[smorizio]

if it an older dell pc check that the mb bios will support 1tb drives. if it does use a test power supply to see if the power supply is going bad from age. also if it a dell optiplex 200 google the model and class ation lawsuits some of them had bad caps on the mb and there was a class action (270).

 

[sgupta]

Thanks for the feedback. The computer does see the drive fine, all 1 TB, but it is making me wonder if it doesn't fully support it for some reason. Thinking of trying an older SATA II drive to see. This isn't an Optiplex - I should have mentioned the model; it's a Dell Inspiron 545.

I don't have a power supply to test at the moment, but that's an interesting thought. However, if it were down to power supply, you'd think it would have failed during the many hours I used HeavyLoad or during system diagnostics, not when idle afterwards. Still, it's something I should consider.

Appreciate the help!

 

[sgupta]

So for anyone curious, it DOES appear (still early, but getting pretty convincing) the new hard drive was the issue.

As I said, drive tests fine, no bad sectors, S.M.A.R.T. looks all good, but as soon as I replaced it with a Seagate SATA II with a bit smaller capacity, the crashes SEEM to have stopped (we're at around 36 hours, and the longest I made it before was 30, which was by far the exception...most of the time it crashed within 24).

Crossing my fingers that this is it.