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Cheech151337

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Black and Decker Hard Drive shredder aka P5AD2-E Premium

To get to the question, I need to tell a story, since the problem is not so defined.  It all started with a loan from my dad, it ended up coming to $2023.53 and money well spent I'm my opinion.  I have built a few computers in the past and even work part time after school (high school) at a local computer repair shop, I scrounged around the Internet for the lowest prices on name brand parts to construct my dream PC.  It has not 3 but 4 Hitachi Deskstar 7200 RPM SATA-150 164.7GB hard drives, a beefy Ledtek WinFast PX8600 TDH 256MB graphic card, a modest 3.6 GHz P4 with HT cooled by a nice fire red Thermaltake volcano fan, 1GB of Mushkin's finest PC2-4200 Ram, with power supplied by a 500w elements power supply and the whole mess is tied together with the Asus P5AD2-E Premium motherboard.  Life was good, I had all my drives on Raid-0 for maximum speed, no driver issues in site.  Later I find out that one my my precious hard drives was bad, must be shipping!  I promptly sent it back for RMA and cut my losses because of Raid-0.  New drive came, works great!  Here we go raid-0 again, whats this, blue screens of death?  Can't be, its a fresh install of Win XP Pro, but it is, another (diffrent) drive flunks the HGST Drive Fitness test.  OK, must be a bad batch, sent that one back.  New one in the mail, pop it in to a already installed XP system with no raid, works good for months.  Soon Delayed write failures start to pop up, each reboot takes 3-4 times to get it to kick in, do you want to do a ChkDsk?  Why not?  ChkDsk done, blue screen of death, getting scared.  Reboot, blue screen, safe mode, blue screen.  Crap!  Ran DFT again, what do we find?  3rd drive down the crapper.  Before I RMA again, I installed XP on one of the other drives and copied off important data, and then sent it back.  Upon viewing the data, every other file was corrupted and 12 out of 150 Anime episodes passed their CRC :-(  Oh well, it happens, no use crying over split milk.  New drive comes, quick glance, its a referb; hey, as long as it works, pop it in, expected no troubles wrong!  BIOS reports gibberish for its name, cant access it.  Run my DFT (I just leave it in the drive now) that one is kissed right out of the box.  Great!  I go to take out the drive, the male end comes with my cord, now I have a useless cord and drive, it keeps getting better every time!  Finally after a few calls to Hitachi, I get manual authorization to send that one back, since the website rejected it.  New one comes in the mail, its also a refurb, ain't foolin' me this time, run DFT before anything else, it passes no problem... luck.  OK!  After loosing all my data more times than I wish to admit I figure the sensible thing to do is partition 22 gigs for C drive so I can back it up on 5 DVD-RW's, the remaining 3 will be used for Raid-5, for safe storage.  Install XP Pro, everything is fine, install raid drivers, restart, Mr. BSOD comes to say hello, I say "Get out of my face BSOD!" and reboot, normal mode, blue screen, safe mode, blue screen, last known good config, Bingo!  I try and try and try to install drivers, Default raid drivers, soft raid 5 drivers, Asus's updated drivers on their site, silicon images updated drivers on their site.  BSOD ain't havin' it.  At a stalemate I decide to reset default bios settings, reboot and wallah no more blue screen, but SAM reports error in the transparent layer, so I uninstall SAM, reinstall, uninstall, reinstall, yatta yatta, No luck, I even reformatted and tried it fresh with the new bios a few times.  Gave up with raid and installed xp on a single drive no raid, works fine for a while.  Soon Delayed write failures, windows wants to do ChkDsk's now, reboots turn into battles.  On a cold boot I power it on, it goes threw POST, dies when it tries to load windows, after the beep but before the logo, F8 Still works but no options gets it to boot.  6-7 more trials, progressively getting better each time.  Soon I get a desktop but delayed write errors run rampid.  Sounds like a bad HD again, run DFT, finds a few bad sectors but checks out after it fixed them.  Shut down for the night again, same story next day.  On the 3rd day before I tried to boot windows, I slammed it with a advanced test in the DFT, passes with flying colors, try to boot windows, no show.  It eventually boots and I got a limping computer.  Raid still wont install, I'm still paying for a computer that hasn't worked right since day 1.  I am in tough shape, I am the laugh of my friends who veiw me as the computer geek that can't even fix his own computer, yet dose it all day at work.  I am tapped out, I can't find a similar case on the Internet.  I wish it was a Dell where I can kick and scream and have them give me a new one, but I built it from scratch form at least 5 different vendors.  I am willing to accept defeat and seek professional help, I don't want to send another drive back to Hitachi, whose address I know by heart.  This is where you come in, I am out of ideas, I have a few of my own hypothesises but non I can prove:

A. Over heating of the drives they are stacked right on top of each other in the midsized case, it has two fans blowing threw the cracks, I the used factory holes, and the fans seem to be there for this very reason.

B. Flakey power supply, passably fluctuating voltage is causing damage over time?  It has a 5 year warranty, I can return that no problem.

C. Motherboard?  I really don't want to think about it being a bad MB, A MB can't fry a drive, can it?

Sorry for the rant and the boring story, but I needed to get that out.  I am going insane with frustration, never before has something ever put up a fight like this.  I hope you can read the above and follow the story line, I will clear anything up, provide pictures, heck I will even pay to ship it to and from one of your guy's houses so you can personally take a whack at it.  HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!

Edit: Have some pictures!  More if requested:
http://img236.echo.cx/img236/6742/dscf34266mm.jpg

Mix bag of BSOD's I got during my journey:
http://img122.echo.cx/img122/4928/dscf34438xa.jpg
http://img122.echo.cx/img122/7141/dscf34426xn.jpg
http://img122.echo.cx/img122/595/dscf34410rg.jpg
http://img122.echo.cx/img122/3904/dscf34380dk.jpg
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nobus
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Avatar of kwapaw
kwapaw

See if you could test the hard drive(s) on another motherboard. If it works fine, then it shouldn't be the problem.

You may also want to check your hard drive configuration. You may be messing something badly.

Avatar of Cheech151337

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Unfortunately I only have one computer that has SATA ports, and that's the one that is broke.  I'm not really sure what I would learn even if I did put them in another computer, they can fail anywheres from right out of the box to a few months.  I totally agree with you nobus, it can't be the disk's fault all those times, and maybe my reluctance to blame my mb is the real problem.  I will give this question a bit longer to see if any more good suggestions spring up.  A bad mb would explain why this problem seems to be getting progressively worse and worse :-\
How about trying the hard drives in a non-RAID 0 configuration?

You may also want to try updating the BIOS on the motherboard.

These suggestions are merely for isolating the source of the problem. Thing is, I don't think it's certain that your hard drive(s) or the motherboard is the culprit.
I have tried the non RAID 0 several times, in fact I ran no raid for a long time yet it still currupted itself over.  Now, only no raid will allow the os to boot.
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So where do you suggest I put them?
Just RMA'd the MB, while it is gone I will relocate 2 hard drives out of the box, somehow...  If there are problems with the new board I will make a new question.
The way I solved my space problem was to get an inexpensive server case that could hold 7 drives - it came with fans to direct air around the drives, and the mount points are spaced apart.