Randomly disappearing HD

[GrammatonCleric]

You know I began searching this forum because of this very problem, disappearing HDD during a cold boot.

 

I have a DFI NF3 board (see sig) that I have been using since December of 2004. The original configuration was 2 X 80GB PATA Maxtors in a RAID 0 for the system drive and 2 X 80GB SATA Maxtors in a RAID 0 for Video recording. End of last summer I upgraded the two 80GB SATA drives to 250GB for a 460GB+ RAID 0 array for video recording. Never a problem. This machine was on appliance status as far as the drives were concerned. I use the nVidia IDE drivers BTW...

 

Then I had the great idea to rearrange the drives to use the PATA RAID stripe for video recording, fold the two SATA drives into a RAID 1 mirror for archiving and move the system drive onto a single WD Raptor. So the set up looks like this:

 

IDE 0: Primary=Optical, Secondary=empty

IDE 1: Primary=80GB Maxtor, Secondary=80GB Maxtor, these two make a RAID 0 stripe. (shows up as drive 1 in XP disk management).

 

SATA 1: 74GB WD Raptor, this is the system drive (shows up as drive 0 in XP Disk management).

 

SATA 2: empty

 

SATA 3: 250GB SATA Maxtor

SATA 4: 250GB SATA Maxtor, these two drives are folded into a RAID 1 mirror (shows up as drive 2 in XP disk management).

 

The HDD boot order is set as follows WD Raptor, IDE RAID 0, SATA RAID 1, so that the drives come up as 0, 1, 2 in XP disk mangement and C:, E: and F: in Explorer (D: is the optical drive).

 

The thing is, I don't think its the Maxtors, because the problem first manifested itself as the system not finding the WD Raptor and rearrangeing the HDD boot order, i.e. it found the Maxtors, but not the Raptor. Another things is this, it didn't happen all the time. Only on a cold boot, after the machine had been down for more than a few hours. I found I could, when the problem occured, go into the BIOS, get everything straightened out, then reset, even shut down and reboot

without any problems, as long as the machine wasn't down too long. So I set the HDD delay to 15 seconds and it still would not find the drives after a long time off!

 

You know what I've decided? It's not the brand of drive or even neccessarily the MB or BIOS (unless there was BIOS mod to wait even longer than 15sec, or until something showed up) but that, in order to save money on heating oil, I had the ambient temperature at approx 18-19C. Maybe my room was just too cold for the drives to spin up quickly enough? So, last night I turned the heat up a couple of degrees and the machine booted just fine this afternoon with an ambient temp of 21C. I'll see what happens over the next few days.... :cool:

 

I noticed you live were it gets real cold, does this story sound helpful?

[Cooler]

As I like to have a bit low room temperature, that could explain latest (and possibly one other, much earlier) incident, but not all of them. Even when it's cooler (oh, did someone just tried to make a joke about himself?!) here, I'm doubtfull about this would solve the problem, as my computers do not know "off" status other than absolutely neccessary minute or two while I'm doing upgrades etc.

 

Computer running 24/7 rarely gets too cold, eh?

[GrammatonCleric]

A "Cooler" with warm computers....

 

Right, shouldn't get too cold if they're on all the time. I had been using my particular NF3 250Gb for 10 months or so with 4 Maxtors, as mentioned earlier, with absolutley no problem drive-wise (with the 914 DFI BIOS). Anyway my latest take is it to SET the HT speed to 800 MHz. So far, no problem. has been booting just fine for days, we'll see... :cool:

[scyphe]

Is this the well known cold boot problem? I have that as well. It doesn't find the disks, and it goes into RAID search, and reboots.. Usually works after that. Strange thing though, like the capacitors aren't fully loaded during a cold boot.

[GrammatonCleric]

Exactly! (at least for me).

 

That's exactly what happens, If you've experienced the problem then I would guess it really doesn't seem to matter what drives you've got, or how they're hooked up, it just doesn't see them until it's warmed up a bit. I moved my room temp up to 68F and put in a 9 sec delay, and set the HT speed to 800 MHz (4 X FSB), hasn't happened recently. If it does, I guess I'll just reboot and live with it until there is an official BIOS release that specifically addresses the issue...

 

I noticed you have a 6/23 BIOS for your NF3 Lanparty UT, did your get this from the BIOS factory?

[scyphe]

I got it from the excellent bootable cd-image created by Tmod:

 

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22031

 

It's got a lot of bios'es for the DFI nForce2/3/4 boards as well as various utilities. It was extremely easy to flash the bios with it, in a safe way. Even for those of us (incl. myself) without floppy drives.

 

*Highly recommended*

[GrammatonCleric]

Thanks, I'll check it out...

[learners permit]

I think whoever solves this problem has a shot at becoming a DFI employee.

[GrammatonCleric]

Well, its been four days since my last post and the problem hasn't reoccured.

 

What I did do, besides putting in a 9 second delay before it checks for the drives, was set the HTT to 4 X FSB (800 MHz). The system is now running like a champ.