My friends brand new micro PC is playing very very bad games.
Long version
Particularly:
Pausing occasionally when something is plugged in. (complete freeze, reboot required)
Wiping the partitions from things. Two days after using it, it forgot a partition on the internal SATA2 drive.
Two days later, he plugs in his ByteStor Flash Stick. And it freezes the computer, so he resets, he finds
window's reports his flash drive as blank.
Now he didn't stop to use a MBR utility or file recovery, as he just formatted the devices as Windows recommended.
Now he buys a USB2/ESata hard drive docking station to move around the data from his last PC. I install the
ESata card for him. (It's a tight fit under the huge Geforce 8800GTS graphics card, all the ports are under the
Geforce 8800GTS also). Doing this I managed to reduce the air flow to the Geforce slightly because the eSATA
bracket cable passed directly over the Geforce 8800GTS cooling fan intake. Noticeable because it's temperature
later in windows would be higher and the fan speed higher also (and significantly noisy now - from once it was silent).
Well this made me look really bad and very stupid, but what could I do, I can't stretch the cable like a rubber band.
I've since suggested removing eSATA and said just use USB2. Which is a shame, the difference in speed is what
takes hours is done in 2 minutes with eSATA. In particular he only uses backup to backup large file libraries
- sometimes containing several hundred thousands of files, last transfer was just under a million files, usually
total upto around 500GB a time. I often joke he keeps the hard drive industry going. He doesn't even buy cheap
drives either, all his drives are the million hour plus certified enterprise ranges.
So now he plugs in his Seagate ES 500GB drive to the eSATA docking station, switches it on, the computer freezes,
when he resets, it's recognised but is reporting the wrong partition name. It reports a small partition made years
ago that had been deleted for a long time.
Well the computer other than when it's wiping / corrupting partition tables is quite stable, passes tests, heavy
resource games can be left unattended for hours with no fear of it crashing.
This is bad news for him, this drive is the one with his past 3 years worth of data, and no backups, he phones me
in my sleep and I offer immediately to help, but he says go back to sleep.
Later I find him trying all sorts of amazing one click programs promising to sort out problems like a magic wand.
Of course they do nothing but waste several hours only pretending they're performing functions to justify their existence.
So I remember the post on badcaps by Wil, and suggest file scavenger, immediately it detects 35,000 files and
offers to recover them to any device (not simply to the faulty drive as the others did). Pretty good. So
I do the long scan now, and it find all of his files just under 1 million of them. I save the found file list, to
save any more scanning. A strange thing is it thinks the files are on FAT 12 partitions?. And recovery is perfectly transferred to the Iomega 1TB USB2 drive.
Now he offers me his new PC for a knock down price on what he paid and said he's going to buy another new
one ( most likely the most expensive per pound possible) from a reputable company instead. But he's
already spending far beyond his means. I feel really bad about the whole thing.
Here is the PC specs:
Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L Motherboard
460W Gigabyte Power Supply
Intel Core2Duo E6850 CPU
XFX 8800GTS Graphics
2 x 2GB Corsair TwinX XMS2 DDR2
3.5" port All in one card Reader
320GB Samsung SATA2
ASUS DVD drive
Coolermaster Tower Case
Widows XP Home Edition SP2
Latest motherboard drivers
2 SATA connectors in use.
2 Rear USB2 ports in use with cheap ebay extensions attached.
2 front USB2 ports in use.
Other front ports all connected.
All connectors touching Geforce 8800GTS
and in close proximity to hard drives.
Short version
Summary of issues:
Wiping/ corrupting partition table internal hard drives.
Wiping/ corrupting partition table external hard drives.
Wiping/ corrupting partition table USB flash drives.
Freezing up when hot plugging devices. (Where last PC did not. )
I cannot verify the voltages are stable at the moment, as his board isn't supported by the software monitoring programs I use (MBProbe).
Temperatures are all well below thresholds. CPU 38 - 45 centigrade. Board 35 centigrade. Graphics card 60-75 centigrade.
I used my power monitor, it reads the PC at maximum uses 196 watts at the socket.
Long version
Particularly:
Pausing occasionally when something is plugged in. (complete freeze, reboot required)
Wiping the partitions from things. Two days after using it, it forgot a partition on the internal SATA2 drive.
Two days later, he plugs in his ByteStor Flash Stick. And it freezes the computer, so he resets, he finds
window's reports his flash drive as blank.
Now he didn't stop to use a MBR utility or file recovery, as he just formatted the devices as Windows recommended.
Now he buys a USB2/ESata hard drive docking station to move around the data from his last PC. I install the
ESata card for him. (It's a tight fit under the huge Geforce 8800GTS graphics card, all the ports are under the
Geforce 8800GTS also). Doing this I managed to reduce the air flow to the Geforce slightly because the eSATA
bracket cable passed directly over the Geforce 8800GTS cooling fan intake. Noticeable because it's temperature
later in windows would be higher and the fan speed higher also (and significantly noisy now - from once it was silent).
Well this made me look really bad and very stupid, but what could I do, I can't stretch the cable like a rubber band.
I've since suggested removing eSATA and said just use USB2. Which is a shame, the difference in speed is what
takes hours is done in 2 minutes with eSATA. In particular he only uses backup to backup large file libraries
- sometimes containing several hundred thousands of files, last transfer was just under a million files, usually
total upto around 500GB a time. I often joke he keeps the hard drive industry going. He doesn't even buy cheap
drives either, all his drives are the million hour plus certified enterprise ranges.
So now he plugs in his Seagate ES 500GB drive to the eSATA docking station, switches it on, the computer freezes,
when he resets, it's recognised but is reporting the wrong partition name. It reports a small partition made years
ago that had been deleted for a long time.
Well the computer other than when it's wiping / corrupting partition tables is quite stable, passes tests, heavy
resource games can be left unattended for hours with no fear of it crashing.
This is bad news for him, this drive is the one with his past 3 years worth of data, and no backups, he phones me
in my sleep and I offer immediately to help, but he says go back to sleep.
Later I find him trying all sorts of amazing one click programs promising to sort out problems like a magic wand.
Of course they do nothing but waste several hours only pretending they're performing functions to justify their existence.
So I remember the post on badcaps by Wil, and suggest file scavenger, immediately it detects 35,000 files and
offers to recover them to any device (not simply to the faulty drive as the others did). Pretty good. So
I do the long scan now, and it find all of his files just under 1 million of them. I save the found file list, to
save any more scanning. A strange thing is it thinks the files are on FAT 12 partitions?. And recovery is perfectly transferred to the Iomega 1TB USB2 drive.
Now he offers me his new PC for a knock down price on what he paid and said he's going to buy another new
one ( most likely the most expensive per pound possible) from a reputable company instead. But he's
already spending far beyond his means. I feel really bad about the whole thing.
Here is the PC specs:
Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L Motherboard
460W Gigabyte Power Supply
Intel Core2Duo E6850 CPU
XFX 8800GTS Graphics
2 x 2GB Corsair TwinX XMS2 DDR2
3.5" port All in one card Reader
320GB Samsung SATA2
ASUS DVD drive
Coolermaster Tower Case
Widows XP Home Edition SP2
Latest motherboard drivers
2 SATA connectors in use.
2 Rear USB2 ports in use with cheap ebay extensions attached.
2 front USB2 ports in use.
Other front ports all connected.
All connectors touching Geforce 8800GTS
and in close proximity to hard drives.
Short version
Summary of issues:
Wiping/ corrupting partition table internal hard drives.
Wiping/ corrupting partition table external hard drives.
Wiping/ corrupting partition table USB flash drives.
Freezing up when hot plugging devices. (Where last PC did not. )
I cannot verify the voltages are stable at the moment, as his board isn't supported by the software monitoring programs I use (MBProbe).
Temperatures are all well below thresholds. CPU 38 - 45 centigrade. Board 35 centigrade. Graphics card 60-75 centigrade.
I used my power monitor, it reads the PC at maximum uses 196 watts at the socket.
Comment