System already failing inside of a month

[cst003]

System specs:
CPU - Intel i5-2500K
Mobo - Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
RAM - Crucial Ballistix sport 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600
HDD - Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM
GPU - XFX Radeon HD 6870 1GB *not currently installed, waiting for system to be stable before doing so.*
Case - Cooler Master HAF 912 ATX Mid Tower
PSU - NZXT Hale82 650W ATX12V / EPS12V
Optical -Sony AD-7280S-0B DVD/CD Writer
OS - Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium OEM (64-bit)
WiFi Card - ASUS PCE-N15
Mouse - Logitech M310 (USB)
Keyboard - Microsoft Wireless 800 (USB)
Game controller - Microsoft XBOX360 Wired Controller
Monitor - Dell LCD Flatscreen from friend's old computer *please don't laugh, I sorta ran out of money before being able to get a decent monitor. this will be upgraded later.*

used for:
Gaming [steam mainly], streaming to twitch.tv, some light graphic program usage w/ wacom tablet, no overclocking


Evening ya'll,

So at the beginning of this month, I finally got up the gumption to get the parts together and build my own gaming computer. Before this, since probably the beginning of the summer, I had been lurking around on these forums, as well as the BuildAPC subreddit, reading discussions about different parts and pros/cons of each. Having finally put together a build on pcpartpicker I thought would be good, I posted it to the BAPC subreddit, and got back the general "looks good." I bought the parts and assembled the computer and was ever so happy when it booted up at the first push of the power button.

Everything had been going swimmingly [playing games, streaming onto my twitch account, checking HWiNFO64 for CPU/GPU temps which never rose above 59-63 C] until about two weeks ago the computer stopped recognizing the HDD. I completely unplugged the SATA cable from the mobo and HDD, and switched it out for a new one. I also changed the power supply connector to the HDD. This seemed to work, and when it rebooted I ran Seagate's SeaTools to make sure there were no SMART errors, which there werent. This was during the weekend of the 14th I think that I did this.

Flash forward to the 20th and when I turned on my computer, everything booted up fine, but 5-10 minutes after booting into windows 7 and launching steam, steam chat and the main window froze up and eventually so did windows 7. I couldnt ctrl+shift+esc or ctrl+alt+del. I rebooted into safemode and ran checkdisk. When it got to around this mark in chkdsk, it would flash this BSOD before rebooting itself and going back to not recognizing the HDD. Flipping the switch on the PSU off, unplugging the PSU, plugging the PSU back in and then flipping the switch on again got POST to recognize the HDD, but the check disk screen would start back up again only to flash the BSOD and then go back to not recognizing the HDD.

At this point (monday 7/23), I took it into a local PC repair shop that did free diagnostics, and the tech "pinned" it down to the HD 6870's drivers conflicting with the pce wifi's drivers. I uninstalled all the drivers and registry entries for ATI/AMD as laid out in this overclock.net post and things went well until Friday (7/27) when I went to turn on my computer and windows started running startup repair. It returned many errors over the course of the couple hours I had to try and make it work. Even with the Win7 DVD in the DVD drive, startup repair was unable to fix itself and allow me to get to the win7 login screen.

Over this weekend, I have been running various tests from Hiren's BootCD:
memtest86+ : ran each stick separately for about 2hrs of Walltime, and both came back with 4 passes and 0 fails.
Parted Magic : GSmartControl would fail on long tests of the HDD, but pass on short test and conveyance test. SMART also came back OK in GSmartControl. Unfortunately, I didnt save the logs of these tests, but could very easily get back into parted Magic and run them again if need be.

So, the purpose of this post? To gather any opinions/advice/troubleshooting that I can as to why my system is biting the dust within a month of being built. My next step is to bring my PSU into a repair shop tomorrow and ask them to test it to see if it might be failing, and thus wrecking havoc on my new system.

Anyways, thanks for reading my long sad story and thanks in advance for any help or opinions anyone would be willing to give. If anyone can thing of any more info, or logs, or whatever, that I can collect and paste into this thread that would be more helpful in troubleshooting, please let me know and I will do my damnedest to gather it up and submit it.

 

[JMer806]

Kinda sounds like your HDD is crapping out.

I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on your drivers conflicting, but I will say that that seems strange. Seems like a good solution would be to simply disconnect and not use the WiFi card if that's the case, no? Relocate your router near the PC and use a hardwire connection. Perhaps that will help.

Also, you're going to want to do a fresh install of Windows 7.

 

[jerreddredd]

seems like a HDD or SATA port issue (MB). did you switch SATA ports? did you switch SATA controllers from Intel to the Marvell 88SE9172 ?

 

[cst003]

Kinda sounds like your HDD is crapping out.

I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on your drivers conflicting, but I will say that that seems strange. Seems like a good solution would be to simply disconnect and not use the WiFi card if that's the case, no? Relocate your router near the PC and use a hardwire connection. Perhaps that will help.

Also, you're going to want to do a fresh install of Windows 7.

I'm afraid it's the HDD too, reviews on my model seem to be leaning towards a 50-60% DOA or early failure.

I deleted partitions and reformatted last night and did a clean install. So far, things are ok, but I'm not really expecting it to last.

Thanks for your reply.

 

[cst003]

seems like a HDD or SATA port issue (MB). did you switch SATA ports? did you switch SATA controllers from Intel to the Marvell 88SE9172 ?

Back when POST was having problems recognizing the HDD, I tried knocking the optical drive to the SATA3 ports and the HDD to the SATA6 port that the optical drive was in. This had worked, as POST didnt have any issues recognizing the HDD since then.

When startup repair started having issues getting into win7, i moved the cords back to the SATA6 ports and POST hasnt had any issues recognizing the HDD since then either.

From what I had read, Marvell ports were for AMD CPUs, right? So, no I hadn't plugged the HDD into the Marvell ports.

Thanks for your reply.

 

[JMer806]

I'm afraid it's the HDD too, reviews on my model seem to be leaning towards a 50-60% DOA or early failure.

I deleted partitions and reformatted last night and did a clean install. So far, things are ok, but I'm not really expecting it to last.

Thanks for your reply.

Maybe that will be enough to fix the problem. In any case, the drive is probably under warranty, so as long as your files are all backed up then you shouldn't need to worry too much.

I'd probably do a weekly or even semi-weekly backup of any important files to an external.

 

[cst003]

Maybe that will be enough to fix the problem. In any case, the drive is probably under warranty, so as long as your files are all backed up then you shouldn't need to worry too much.

I'd probably do a weekly or even semi-weekly backup of any important files to an external.

Thankfully, the entire reason for this PC was to play games and take the burden off my laptop I use for school [which is where all my real important files reside].. and since steam saves the majority of my settings/game saves in their cloud service, there really arent any files i deem super important on the pc.. just a matter of reinstalling games/software i use..

And, yes, thankfully the HDD was bought within the past month, so Seagate's warranty is still in effect for it for quite a while longer. I just dread the process of RMA-ing, but, if that's what needs to be done I'll be doing it when the HDD fails completely.

 

[jerreddredd]

From what I had read, Marvell ports were for AMD CPUs, right? So, no I hadn't plugged the HDD into the Marvell ports.

nope, it's just a second controller. I usually set it up in AHCI mode for my SSD the us the Intel controller for RAID.

 

[MidnightDistort]

I would probably run a stress test on the hdd.. SiSoftware Sandra is one i have. I never used the hdd test but if your having issues with your hdd then finding out whether it's the cause would be better instead of waiting for it to die out. Run it for 4 hours straight or more (couldn't hurt) and also get SpinRite. Run the top level (Level 4 or 5) if all comes back clean then you shouldn't have an issue with the drive then. Granted it does stress your drive out a little but if there was something wrong with it you should have some errors, if not then the drive should be healthy then. It could be the Sata port you used. It either doesn't work correctly or it might have not been the right port.

 

[cst003]

From what I had read, Marvell ports were for AMD CPUs, right? So, no I hadn't plugged the HDD into the Marvell ports.

nope, it's just a second controller. I usually set it up in AHCI mode for my SSD the us the Intel controller for RAID.

I would probably run a stress test on the hdd.. SiSoftware Sandra is one i have. I never used the hdd test but if your having issues with your hdd then finding out whether it's the cause would be better instead of waiting for it to die out. Run it for 4 hours straight or more (couldn't hurt) and also get SpinRite. Run the top level (Level 4 or 5) if all comes back clean then you shouldn't have an issue with the drive then. Granted it does stress your drive out a little but if there was something wrong with it you should have some errors, if not then the drive should be healthy then. It could be the Sata port you used. It either doesn't work correctly or it might have not been the right port.

THANK YOU BOTH SO MUCH! When I woke up this morning, I turned on my PC and it started doing the win7 freeze & not recognizing the HDD in POST again.. I switched the SATA cables over to the blue Marvell ports on my MOBO, ran Sandra's HDD & File system test for the afternoon (a little over 4 hours) and nothing bad occurred.. No power shortages, no HDD dying, no freezing of win7 and definitely, thankfully still no burning smells emanating from my case. I think this might have solved the instability. [and narrowed it down to MOBO port error, or maybe still user-error]

I'll continue to run HDD diagnostic tests over the next week or so. If things go back to the instability problems [hopefully not], I'll just go ahead and man-up and bring it into a tech shop to see if they can further pinpoint what is going on.

Big props to everyone who contributed to my troubleshooting adventures!

 

[MidnightDistort]

lol i jinxed one of my hdd's lol im not sure which one it is on my older PC, but my 160gb IDE seems to have some seek errors already. =( i had expected it was the main drive since that one has had so much thrashing from lack of RAM resources (some of the RAM was being stored to the HDD) but apparently my 06' is finally hitting the bottom even though that one hardly has been used. Weird...

Edit: Oops, wrong forum thread.. lol but for those who are curious: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/357052-31-built-computer-finding-site#t2688570

 

[MidnightDistort]

It could be something with your motherboard tho if your not experiencing any HDD failure. Definitely use the SpinRite, which is far more accurate then windows scandisk imo. I don't recall where i found the program at, but it's an .iso so you'll need to burn it to a cd or possibly a dvd. RW's work usually if you got one lying around.