New build, same problems. Need exorcist

Hardware Build a PC
1

Hello guys,

As a introduction, I've been a lurker for a long time now and really enjoy the content. I have a head-scratcher here so I figured this would be the best place to get some ideas! I have been building computers since I was a teenager (27 now), and have been working in the IT field my adult life, so trust me I've been trying all the troubleshooting steps I can think of.

My old computer (Phenom II 955, GTX 460, 2GB RAM, OCZ Vertex SSD) has been very good to me while it lasted. However in the past 6 months I've had issues with Windows randomly shutting down and having corruption on my hard drive. It seemed to ramp up exponentially until it wouldn't even detect my hard drive at all. I was also having some minor issues with USB ports not working, so I figured I'd replace the PSU and SSD.

Got a Corsair Enthusiast Series TX650 as a PSU replacement, and a Mushkin 120GB SSD. The issues started all over again. If I ran a chkdsk on reboot, it would literally scroll TONS of bad files that it was fixing, sometimes in a 2 hour window of the last chkdsk.

At this point I was starting to get frustrated so I thought it may be the raid controller on my motherboard. So, I went out and got a MSI Z77A-G45 with a i3 3220 (I'm on a budget), 8GB DDR3 Ripjaw RAM, and new SATA cables. This was Monday.

Here I am on Thursday, and guess what? Windows started shutting down randomly, and there were tons of hard drive errors until it will no longer even boot into windows (tries to do a repair every time).

 

The only components that are the same:

Video card (GTX 460)

Power cable

Surge protector

Monitor

Keyboard/Mouse

Case

I'm going to remove my video card when I get home today, reinstall Windows, and see what happens. If this doesn't fix it, I was going to buy a new UPS and power cable and hard drive. If that doesn't work, I'm beating it with a hammer.

The only explanation I have is that my old motherboard messed up my new SSD too.

 

2

My first guess was bad drive/firmware, then motherboard, but seeing that replaced both, I'm guessting faulty install of Windows. Reformat and re-install.

Alternative solution: Use Linux. But that's kinda been my solution to all Windows problems lately...

3

hey mann jsut to take a guess it could possibly be the motherboard if your having the same problems and maybe a new copy of windows if you can spare some cash but check your mobo its quite easy to assume something is wrong with it maybe in the sata connection area

4

to add to this i could imagine its an old mobo ddr2 perhaps but whatever the case your parts may be too new for the motherboard just a guess

5

I've replaced the motherboard along with the CPU already : (

6

Thanks, yeah I think I'm going to live boot linux and see if it shuts down.

7

hard drive sound corput

8

That could be the case if my old motherboard messed up two SSD's somehow (Got a new SSD before the mobo/cpu/sata cable/psu replacement). I was thinking this may be the case. I'm about to run some low level disk tools on it to see if it has any errors.

9

could it be a bad OS iso or something? is there anything that could be causing magnetic interference in your mobo?

 

10

I took some really small eye glass frame screws and placed them around various parts around my computer desk to see if they moved any, probably not the best type of test for interference though. It may be a bad ISO, I got it from a online OEM vendor, but the key never worked.

Right now I've installed Linux Mint on the SSD and have been running it for a couple hours without a shutdown. I'll have to wait a day or two to see if anything happens. If not I'll have to try another Windows 7 ISO.

 

11

Woke up this morning and my computer was off. Booted it up, Linux Mint was trying to fix hard drive errors. I hate my life.

12

this is a mere shot in the dark but maybe you got a virus that got into your bios and then recontaminated your new ssd's when you reinstalled windows, have you tried wiping your bios? and reinstalling it. or even you could get a new motherboard once again if that does'nt work

13

Using an old drive for all your data?

My little brothers PC had similar issues. It kept corrupting files until it wouldn't boot. The problem was in the HDD cache, which didn't flush correctly.

Maybe you should try turning off the harddrives built-in caching function and see what happens.

14

I did a BIOS update when I got it. I may RMA the motherboard soon.

15

When I first set up my new motherboard/cpu, I did hook my 2 x 1TB drives to it, and disconnected them when I started having problems.

Is the HDD caching something that has to be done from the BIOS or a firmware utility from the manufacturer (Mushkin)?

16

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/10392-write-caching-enable-disable.html

17

^THIS^

18

Thanks for the link!