A very bad problem has started happening lately with my computer. It started around the 10th of this month. My hard drive seems to be shutting off for no apparent reason. It seems to be happening the most during more intense programs. Such as games and to my utter dismay all of my modeling and texturing programs. So I figured my power connection was loose. So I checked it and unplugged it and plugged it back in. I'm still having problems. My power supply should be more than powerful enough for my system. Specs:

PowMax 400W PSU

ASUS P4B MB

Intel 1.6Ghz No HT

256 MB PC-133 RAM

NVidia GeForce FX 5600 XT 128 MB

Seagate 80GB 7200 RPM IDE HDD

Sound Blaster SB LIVE! Sound Card


Yes I know my system is very old and low end. But I've been fine until just recently. Any ideas what could be causing this problem? I'm trying not to play any games or model now. Just in case it causes more harm to my computer.

Also, yes I have defragged and done a disk cleanup. Virus scan brought up nothing and a spyware scan showed nothing.

There's a rule of thumb when it comes to power supplies: if you pick one up and it feels light enough you could easily throw it clear across the room, do so. Powmax is notorious for making cheap kit with very small components; you're just lucky the thing lasted as long as it did.

If you want to be absolutely sure before buying a new power supply, you can always fire up a hardware monitoring program and check what your voltages look like when idle and under load --- but I have a feeling you already know exactly what the result will be.

Yea..sound like a power supply over heating and giving out. I had one do the same thing once.

Ohh and don't throw it across the room...might break something important. I blew mine up with multiple shot gun blasts

All hard drives have a rating called MTBF (mean time before faliure)
The mesurement is the average number of hours the drive will operate before failing.

Sadly they do not come with odometers to warn us when time is runing out.

Heat is also a drive killer. Some drives today are monitored for high temps and will cut out before damage can happen. Just like some boards will warn if the CPU is reaching self destructive temps. (I won't even mention overclocking).

I know you my friend, and you have simply worked the thing to death.

Backing it up should be your only priorty at this point.

The failures will just keep occuring untill one day the drive just won't start.

You should by now know how to reach me if I can help.
But just in case I will try to give Septim my number...

Well, being a testosterone pumped teenager with good arm muscles. I could easily throw my entire computer across the room. But thats besides the point.

Using PC Wizard 2008 my voltages are:

+3.3V Voltage : 3.31 V
+5V Voltage : 5.11 V
+12V Voltage : 12.34 V

The idle. How do I check it under load?



As for Stormravens post. My hard drive is almost 1 year old. So it should be fine for awhile... As for over heating. Theres not really alot of heat generated.

Processor Temperature : 45 °C
Mainboard Temperature : 28 °C

Thats idle again.

And my GPU is so pathetic it can't generate that much heat. So theres not really alot of heat problems going on.

I think I'll have to agree with others here, you're simply best off just trying to get a new hard drive. memory is fairly cheap these days. The biggest problem with that is that it means taking a day or two to reinstall everything and copy files over. But it's best to bite the bullet now, rather than wait till everything stops working and you're left with a hard drive that has everything on it that you need, but cannot access.

And if it turns out to just be a bad connection somewhere, you could always mount the old drive as a secondary for storage of non-important files, or setting up windows to use a portion of it for paging.

The only problem is I don't have the money to buy a new one. So it could be awhile before I get one.

Thanks for the help though guys.

Sorry, I got the wrong idea on age of Drive.

Can you give me model and serial numbers?

Seagate 80GB 7200 RPM IDE HDD

Drive should still be under warranty.

I can check w/mfr for you. If you like.

They have professional software available to uber test the drive.

I mean tell you things you never wanted to know. lol.

I can get that too.

Give me a shout...



You know I did this for so many years it became a pain in the...
But it paid well.
Doing it for a friend, for free sounds like fun now.
Weird huh?



Don't see anything alarming in your voltages.
If the machine is on HD is always spinning, therefore under load.
Ya didn't tell the drive to sleep after x num min idle did ya?
Check windows settings, BIOS, and once I have above info,
we can check the Drive BIOS as well.


Stormraven

Thats a very kind offer Stormraven. Though I don't know how you could do the tests. We probably live a couple thousand miles away from each other. Though I will see if the warranty is still valid.

Usually hardrive failures are mechanical not power... How cool does your system run, do you have a horde of killer dust bunnies pillaging your system? Id check the temps also, it might be as simple as that.

Sometimes things just ‘crap out’ after a short while. Even if the company made 20 million of whatever you bought, and only 0.5% are bad, that’s still 100,000 bad units, and of those ‘bad’ units, not all are actually ‘bad’ per se, but some may conk out sooner than is normal (maybe even past the warranty) but will last longer than the ‘truly bad’ units.

Your PC setup is ancient though… I will say that all PC hardware starts to ‘misbehave’ after a few years; for instance I got an ‘almost’ top of the line laptop in 2001, but by 2005 it was so crappy it would sometimes have problems booting up.

I paid $2400 for it too *cries* but I figured it had a good run and it was time for a new one.

Now my PC -sometimes- acts up, and I custom built it back in 2005. This summer, my hardware will be about 3yrs old, and I can ‘feel’ how things are a bit slower than they were when everything was ‘cherry’.

I’d say always think about a major system overhaul every 3 – 5yrs (whichever is in your budget) and a ‘nickel and dime’ upgrade policy interim (i.e. a new video card that is better than yours but still cheap in comparison to ‘top of the line’ stuff; 8600GT upgrade over a 7600GT, for instance).

But when it’s time to get a new motherboard, then it’s time to overhaul. My motherboard won’t connect DDR2 or DDR3 RAM, because its ram slots have two nicks (DDR1 style), and DDR 2/3 ram only has one ‘nick’ in the chip card *sigh*

I will say that Western Digital makes some mean HDs. Never had any major issues with my 10,000 RPM HDs or my 550w turepower PS (which I know is a little low by today’s standards of 650w).

I, I'd go with Western Digital or Seagate, if you decide to get a new HD, they are both excellent.

On the other hand... I notice your current HD is IDE... if at all possible, you should really get a SATA one, though I don't think your motherboard supports it - not only is SATA much faster, but IDE drives are getting increasingly hard to get hold of these days. I was buying myself a new HD (Western Digital 320Gb - my old 160gb one just isnt big enough anymore), and I only saw one IDE drive listed on the site. Of course, if your mobo doesnt have any SATA ports, you're kinda screwed.

Oh, and one more thing - if you do get a SATA drive, make sure to order a SATA data cable too, as its needed to connect to the motherboard, and new disks dont typically come with one. I just made this mistake, which cost me an extra fiver in delivery costs, opposed to the amount i'd have paid had I ordered them together <_<

Just for reference, my HD cost £57, inc. delivery + VAT, not inc. the cable, which came to another £9.98, so if you're getting a smaller, IDE drive, then it could potentially be around £15. Not too bad, really.