Hard drive crashes caused by motherboard?

[Lucas Gray]

So I've recently built a computer, everything was working fine but after a month or so it started freezing randomly, only fixed by restart. Then on boot some hard drives would say they have bad sectors and failed SMART. After a few weeks eventually the entire system crashed and would not boot on any of my drives.

I managed to get it boot on a CD and reformatted the SSD drive that the operating system was on. I replaced the (supposedly) failing drives and things were looking good. But it wasn't more then a week or two when it started freezing randomly again (sometimes in the middle of activities, sometimes when it was just left on) And again saying the, now brand new, drive was failing, though from everything I can tell it is not when I run disk checks from booting from a boot CD.

I'm not expert so I have really am at a loss as to what to check. I can't afford to keep replacing my hard drives and like I said it doesn't even seem to be actually true, if I disconnect then reconnect the drive it seems to come up fine.

My suspicion is that either the SSD drive, that the OS is on, is causing the trouble or else its my motherboard. Honestly, I have no proof of either but I am pretty much out of my depth here. Here is the general specs on my system:

[FONT=verdana]Mother board: ASUS P8Z77-V LK LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS[/FONT]

[FONT=verdana]CPU: [/FONT][FONT=verdana] [/FONT][FONT=verdana]Intel Core i5-2500 Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics[/FONT]

[FONT=verdana]RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 Desktop Memory Model CMZ16GX3M4X1866C9[/FONT]

[FONT=verdana]SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)[/FONT]

[FONT=verdana]Video Card: EVGA GeForce 8400 GS 1 GB DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 DVI/HDMI/VGA[/FONT]

l have severaI other hard drives, internal and external attached, most of them don't seem to have any trouble, the one that consistently fails is always label E: even when I change the physical drive out, not sure if that means anything or not.

Any help would be much appreciated, not sure where to even start honestly. Let me know if I need to make anything more clearly.

Lucas

 

[DelJo63]

they have bad sectors and failed SMART.

S.M.A.R.T. is enabled in the HD firmware. Failures at that level are purely hardware related. Such failures create bad sectors.

Q.E.D.:- the drive is just cr*p.

IMO, the motherboard could never create a HD failure - - while software can do so as well as bad user procedures
(eg sharing r/w a folded and two or more users opening the same file at the same time).
Bad disk drivers would easily be a contributor too.

 

[Lucas Gray]

Yeah I assumed that about SMART, but I wasn't sure. That being said it didn't fail every time I booted, and I ran other disk checks and it passed, even the SMART. Any thoughts on what might cause it to fail only temporarily?

The drive you refer to I assume is the SSD? I am getting that impression too, I tried installing the OS (win 7) on a regular drive rather then the SSD, but it automatically boots from the SSD; when I force it to boot from the regular drive it blue screens.

I am hoping that is the case, either way I am just not sure when to do. I will try updating the drivers.

Thank you for your thoughts.

 

[DelJo63]

Yeah I assumed that about SMART, but I wasn't sure. That being said it didn't fail every time I booted, and I ran other disk checks and it passed, even the SMART. Any thoughts on what might cause it to fail only temporarily?

That inconsistency is REALLY a problem!! What tool are you using to see the SMART report? IMO, inconsistent results, especially in SMART implicates bad tools for getting the data.

I've been using Defraggler by Piriform (select the drive -> Health tab) since XP and now again on Win/7 Pro 64bit.

 

[Lucas Gray]

I've been booting Parted Magic which has a program called test disk, which tells me its fine. Its only on boot that it has said their is a problem. Usually I can just restart and it doesn't do it again though. Which makes me think its a software problem and that the disk is actually fine.

The first hard drive it did it on I replaced, and within two weeks it started saying it for the brand new drive. Both drives had Win 7 installed on it, could that possibly be a problem?

I will try Defraggler.

All in all I have 8 drives plugged in to this machine, is that possibly a problem?

 

[Lucas Gray]

I am wondering now if it is possibly the CPU? I am trying to get just use the system but it slows and freezes every thirty seconds or so, then goes back to being fine. I am watching the performance in my task manager and my CPU usage keeps spiking. it will be minimal for a bit then spike all the way to 100% (when it freezes, then drop back down to 1 or 2%. This really baffles me, I have no idea whats going on.