Do I Need A Hard Drive Controller Card?

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conscious1

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I recently purchased a 250gb western digital 7200RPM Ultra ATA-100 hard drive. At the time of the purchase I also purchased a new motherbaord (Chaintech S1689 Socket 939), a new CPU (AMD64 3400+) and 512 mb of pc 3200 400mhz ram. I've been getting lots of problems, including this stop message 0x0000009C, as well as problems unzipping/unraring large files. They are often found to be corrupt, when I know the file could not possibly be corrupt (such as downloading a trial version of Office 2003 directly from the microsoft website). Someone recommended that I should buy a hard drive controller card. I really had no heard of these cards before he mentionned it. Do I require one? What do they do? My system seems to acknowledge that the amount of space on my hard drive is 250gb.
 
Dont Really See How That Card Coul Be Of Any Use To You. Controller Cards Are Normally Used For Adding More Drives And So Fourth. Did You Do A Clean Install Of Xp Or Did You Ghost Xp Onto That System?
 
You don't need an extra HDD controller card to make that hard drive work. You might to look onto the memory. If the memory is bad it can often cause data corruption.

Is there anything special we need to know about your system ? Is it overclocked ? Did you install the proper IDE, AGP drivers for your motherboard ? SP2 installed ?
 
When You Mounted Your Motherboard Did You Install The Spacers?
Also Have You Configured Your Bios To Meet Your Motherboard And Processor Needs? Try Flashing The Bios And Installing All The Updated Drivers For It. Also Download Memtest86 And Check Your Ram For Problems.
 
From MSDN :
This behavior occurs because your computer processor detected and reported an unrecoverable hardware error to Windows XP.
Machine check exceptions are frequently caused by one of the following conditions: • You are running the processor or mainboard beyond its specifications. For example, you are overclocking the processor or bus. We recommend that you run your hardware at the manufacturer-rated speeds.
• Noisy power, overstressed power strips, outmatched power supplies and failing power supplies can destabilize your computer. Make sure that you have a stable, reliable power supply to your computer.
• Extreme thermal conditions caused by the failure of cooling devices such as fans may damage your computer. Make sure that your cooling devices are all working.
• You have damaged memory or memory that is not the correct type for your computer. If you recently changed the memory configuration, revert to the previous configuration to determine what is wrong. Make sure that you are using the correct memory for your computer.
 
Everything is installed properly and I haven't overclocked it or done anything to it. I tried memtest but everything seems to be fine. I really do not know what to do. There is absolutely no way a controller card will help me?
 
Chaintech S1689 Socket 939
there's your problem. chaintech makes some low quality products that often prove to be problematic and flawed. try getting your money back or acquire a name brand board, such as an asus, gigabyte, msi. a good choice for the 939 platform right now is the msi k8n neo2.
 
check the hard drive cable make sure it is 80 wire with no cut connections
reinstall memory make sure they are not touching anything.last time I heard of this similar situation the cpu (new) was bad
 
How about running hard drive diagnostics? Maybe you just got a faulty drive? If you can reproduce the error, try the drive on the other IDE channel or in another computer. Replace the IDE cable.
 
Possible bad memory

You didn't state the memory brand, but I built a brand new S1689 with everything new, and it went ballistic immediately. I had similar problems, and I was fortunate enough to have another spare 512mb memory chip laying around. Turns out the brand new (Ultra) memory chip was defective. It did show up under memtest though.
If you are running winxp, you may try another os like win2k. It may be the ide drivers for the hd are flaking out in xp. XP has a mind of it's own when it comes to drivers and doesn't always choose the correct driver, but usually does for the most part.
MAKE SURE YOU PUT THE Single Sided memory in the blue slots, double sided memory in the black slots - VERY IMPORTANT! Use default mb settings for now.

Make sure you have the latest bios update (I think they only ever put out one), and make sure you have the correct motherboard chipset drivers loaded. Other than that, if it exhibits the same behavior under win2k, return the mb under warranty. Don't kill yourself trying to figure it out. Bad mb's can be tricky to spot sometimes. I have access to a hard disk duplicator that checks for disk defects, so I have the luxary of running hardware diagnostics to check the disk another way. I have enough computers laying around that I can easily move the hd, memory and peripherals to another mb to isolate the problem. My S1689 runs rock solid with 1.5gb of memory under win2k. I am quite please for the low cost and I am not easily pleased. I am a bit disappointed that I can't put the same memory in all 4 slots, so I went to bigger chips. Just for giggles, you may try increasing the swap space to 1gb in virtual memory settings. Look for core files (a .dmp file). If you find a core dump, go to microsoft and download the debugger tool, and open the .dmp file in the utility. The stack trace will tell you what was executing in memory that caused the core dump. I traced a bad printer driver from Minolta on this motherboard. I fought with Minolta until I got an engineer to concede the driver didn't work on ALL motherboards. They gave me a "unidriver" and viola, the printer driver worked! The printer driver worked on my asus mb, but refused to work on the S1689. I had to use their unidriver, which was not on their support site, but I got it emailed from the engineer after I beat on them enough. I don't give up easily! The stack trace told me the problem, but the 2nd problem was getting somebody in 2nd level support at Minolta to understand my stack trace proved their driver was at fault. I have found debugging a core dump is quite valuable in pointing the finger at the cause of crashes, corruption, blue screen of death, etc.
I am an ASUS diehard, and tried this crappy mb for giggles. I was impressed for the price and it has run great for the last year. Good luck. I'm sure you'll find the problem, eventually!

Almost forgot, if you go to win2k on a 250gb disk, the initial load will only give you 138gb ( a sp3 and above issue concerning LBA addressing). Not to worry. Just grab 100gb for now for the primary partition and do your troubleshooting to isolate the operating system as the culprit. If it works, there is a registry hack to get the rest of the disk back, but I am not happy with the issue itself. It's like the old NT4.0 8gb limit issue. Thanks Microsoft.
 
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