MSI Mobo - 4xSATA works partially... Help Please :)

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mke

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Hi there. The past few weeks my system is acting a little strange.
I have an MSI K8N Neo Platinum board with a 3.4ghz.
The board supports 4 sata disks, but lately I can only use 2 or 3 SATA drives.
If i have all 4 drives connected then my system always restarts shortly before xp sp2 has loaded. If i use any 3 of the drives in any configuration, system may boot up (after 5-8 tries).
If i use 2 drives, everything works fine (or at most 3 tries and system starts fine).
This is kinda driving me crazy. Drives are 2xwd 250gb sata1 and 2xseagate 500gb and work just fine on their own.
This system was working fine for over a 2 years, and within the last month it starts acting crazy.
I haven't installed any other devices on the system or any other application.

If anyone has come before this or has any idea/advice, I would really appreciate if you could help me out.

Thanks
 
hi there. i have checked all options with windows and bios settings but that doesnt look like a bios fault.

basically the system when i do i restart it may hang on either the splash screen of windows loading, or when i login with my pass and press enter.
this happens with 99% of the restarts i do. for some unknown reason therefore i cant use all my hd at the moment. any advice where too look for that problem and correct it? can i post some sys file that one can check ? is that possible?


also i tried the other day to change a registry but due to the needed restart for the new entry to take effect, the registry valye was deleted after the 2-3 restarts/hang ups.

this is driving me nuts. :monkey:

any advice much appreciated.

thank you
 
Since it works with two hard drives connected but not more, I wonder if the power supply is failing. Can you check the voltages?
 
Hi there. how can i check the voltage levels without having a psu tester? is there an option via windows or a tool for that?

could that also be the reason why the system restarts 3-4 times till it actually loads windows and not hang and stop responding on the loading screen?

thanks
 
could that also be the reason why......
That's what I was thinking, yes. Go into the BIOS and see what voltages are being reported there. Also, you can download a utility program called Speedfan and it will also report voltages. However, software utilities are not 100% reliable so we'll just see how it compares with what the BIOS is reporting.
 
have you thought on a corrupted driver/registry? try to boot on safe mode with all drives and see what happens. I agree that PSU could be the culprit on a situation like this, but what about using only one HDD? boot up without problems?
 
Hi there, thanks for all your replies.
system wasnt always like that, it used to run smooth, but pust few 5 months is acting like that. i will be downloading that Speedfan tool to check voltages with Bios. is there any other option for checking the voltages?

thanks
 
that is the voltage readings from the Speedfan. Does it make sense to anyone?

Vcore: 1.58V
+12V: 11.86V
3.3V: 3.26V
Vcc: 5.01V
Vin2: 0.00V
5Vsb: 4.99V
Vbat: 0.00V

this is the voltage readings from BIOS:

CPU Vcore 1.53V
+3.3V 3.10V
+12V 12.4V
+5V 5.07V
Battery 3.17V
5V SB 5.04V

system btw is an AMD 64 3400 Clawhammer on an MSI K8N Neo Platinum with a 250gb nforce 3 i think chip. bought new 2 1/2 years ago with 1 120gb ATA, and 4 sata that are not all connected at the moment.

any advice? or ideas?

thanks guys
 
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