Corrupting Files on 'Healthy' Hard Drive and RAM - What Could it Be?

F

FieldMedic

New Member
I have 2 PCs which have been built with very similar hardware both running XP.

Specs:

* AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000 3.1GHz Socket AM2 1MB L2 (2x512KB)
* Kingston 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Memory Non-ecc CL5
* Seagate ST3250410AS 250GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache
* Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 Socket AM2 Nvidia MCP55P PCI-E 8 Channel audio ATX Motherboard
* Innovision Geforce 7300LE 256MB DDR2 PCI-E Graphics Card
* Second Slave Hard Drive
* A DVD RW Drive and CDRW Drive

One PC has an old 450 Watt Power Supply
The other has a brand new 650W power supply:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128675

Problem:

After working fine for a couple of months files started to randomly corrupt until one PC failed. The other PC followed a few weeks later with random files corrupting until the PC becomes unusable.

After reinstalling XP the same thing happens, and seems to be happening in a shorter and shorter time frame, from lasting a day, to now a matter of hours on the 4th reinstall.


I ran SeaTools both Short Test and Long Test but it said the drive passed.

I also Zero Filled the entire hard drive before doing a fresh reinstall but the problem still persisted with files quickly corrupting until XP wouldn't load. Also Zero filled with KillDisk and that went fine too.

It was not just XP files that corrupted but any random file on the hard drive was corrupting (but not on other slave hard drives or USB Drives).

I also suspected RAM so ran MemTest86+ overnight and it passed 21 tests.

So to sum up:

- Files Corrupting After fresh Installs
- RAM passed MemTest overnight Diagnostics
- Passed SeaTools long test and was Zero filled

What could this be? Someone told me to disable AHCI in the Bios as SeaGate drives dont support "native command queue" - however I can't find that option.

Any other ideas? Is the power supply enough?

Any help appreciated :)
 
Wow, First off, Welcome to the Forum! Secondly, thanks for providing so much detial. In fact, I think this is the easiest to read, well laid out thread ever! :)

When you say that only the main HDD is corrupting and the secondary drive is fine, it leads me to think that it could be a bad SATA cable, or connector on the Motherboard. You could try a different connector maybe?
 
Kornowski said:
When you say that only the main HDD is corrupting and the secondary drive is fine, it leads me to think that it could be a bad SATA cable, or connector on the Motherboard. You could try a different connector maybe?
Click to expand...
Thanks for the welcome :)

I'd agree but its happening on two (almost identical) PCs so it would seem odd for two cables to randomly fail.
 
Heh, Yeah. I forgot that it was happening on two PC's, my bad.

Are you using the same XP CD on both computers? It's possible that it could be bad and cause a bad install. Do you have another that you could try?

Or even try out a Linux Live CD for a while and see if it happens.
 
Id place bets on the motherboard, i know some of the older nforce mobos suffered with some data corruption issues, maybe try a bios update?
 
Okay I seem to have go tit working - so far so good :)

Here's what I did:

- Updated the BIOS to latest version.
- Installed from a new XP Disk.
- Installed 64bit XP version of XP (was using a 32bit version before).
- Used the latest drivers from the Gigabyte sute but did not install the SMBus Driver or the Storage Driver.
- Used Comodo Firewall and Antivurus instead of Sygate and Avast.

Put PC through Prime95 Stress tests, defrags, Checkdisks, and did lots of installing. This would have normally been when files to start to corrupt but it has stayed healthy.

Generally the PC seems a whole lot faster too, as does the hard drive.

Possible Causes

So that narrows it down to what possibly caused the file corruptions:

- Outdated BIOS
- Use of 32 bit XP (the drivers on the motherboard CD might have been for 64bit XP which could have caused problems)
- The XP Install CD was dodgy
- Outdated motherboard drivers
- The Nvidia Storage or SMBus drivers for this motherboard are dodgy

I'm not going to narrow it down - I'm just happy the PC is working.

Thanks everyone for all your help! I learned a lot and wouldn't have got it fixed without you.
 
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