Hi all,

Some time ago I built a PC around a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H 780G Socket AM2+ motherboard and an AMD Phenom X3 Triple Core 8450 2.1Ghz processor with 6Gb memory. Running W7 and Ubuntu. All was well until the last few months when every now and then the CMOS appeared to initialise itself and I had to clear it, then set it up again and reboot. Then all would be fine again for a while.

These "events" got more and more frequent until, eventually, I couldn't get it to restart - just back to what appeared to be a corrupt CMOS. The cause was beyond my technical capabilities, so in the end I took the hint and upgraded to a new motherboard (Gigabyte GA-H97M-HD3 with an Intel i5 4460 and 8Gb memory). I kept the case, power supply and drives - a 500Gb Western Digital and a 1Tb Samsung HD103S. The WD is the system drive and the Samsung holds the data. Windows installed all the necessary drivers, I added the new Gigabyte drivers from the included Gigabyte DVD and powered up again. Everything worked just fine - except that the Samsung drive was not recognised either by the BIOS or Windows.

Now to save time I should say that I tried swapping cables (power and signal) and eliminated those early on. Eventually, I discovered that the Samsung was not powering up from a cold start, but that I could "jump start" it by detaching and reattaching the power cable once everything else had powered up. A soft restart would then bring the system up perfectly with the drive already running. I took the opportunity to copy everything off at this point.

I have also noticed that if the drive spins down (eg when system goes into standby) it will not spin up again when system is woken up.

My question (sorry it's taken so long) is this: is the drive not powering at a cold start because it is faulty, or is it not powering up because the power supply hasn't got the necessary juice? Or, for some other reason?

The power supply is a CoolerMaster 500 - ID: RS-500-PCAR-A3.

Thank you in advance,

Steve

Hi,
Many people say they have issues for a while and it kept getting worse and before they could get their DATA off, the drive went bad... so well done for backing it all up.

As you have data, have you looked to see if the drive has a firmware update?

these may be relevant, but check CAREFULLY all details.. even ask here on a procedure before you do it once you think you have it figured out:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/223631en
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/269781-32-hd103uj-firmware
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1725232
http://jack-brennan.com/samsung-firmware-update-for-p67-and-sb850/


One thing that can happen with power supplies is the capacitors go bad. If you open it, you can visually see the capacitors either bulging at the top or leaking. This can cause intermittent or permanent issues, though doesn't exactly sound like the behaviour you are mentioning.

I have heard of people needing to stagger the starting of HDDs, normally in a NAS or RAID, though I have never done it, so cant help with that.

I suggest, read up on firmware and any issues with your mobo chipset, or buy or borrow a power supply to rule that out or identify the culprit.

Sounds like Samsung could possibly be in power up in standby
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-up_in_standby

Loki

Hello Teucer,

if you have another PC connect drive to this PC or ask some friend to connect your drive to his PC.
Sometimes PS can produce such problems.
Since you only change MB, CPU and memory it could be, that the reason for your problems is PS.

Thank you for all the suggestions.

I tried updating the firmware, but it remains at the same level (1AJ100E4) as it was before. Creating a MS-DOS bootable USB was no picnic either! Getting the firmware update to run was the easy bit!

Have looked around the BIOS screens but cannot find anything that suggests I can override "power up in standby".

HDDScan reports it as working OK - apart from 100 "UltraDMA CRC Errors", which I gather from other sites are past errors (and they haven't increased recently). What's more, I can spindown and spinup again with no problem. I've experimented with the Power Management options and nothing fixes the problem.

Still no nearer knowing whether it's the drive or power supply. Although, as I can spindown/spinup using HDDScan I'm leaning towards the view that it is likely to be a mismatch in the BIOS on power up? Any more thoughts gratefully received.

Steve

The best thing is to put the old motherboard, processor and memory back, get it back to normal then run the system without the drive connected. See if it runs okay without it. If its okay, then the drive is the problem, otherwise something could have happened to the drives, staggered start trigger on the SATA cable that keeps it unpowered when everything else is up and running.

If the old system works fine without the drive, no problems, then its the drive messing around and casing BIOS problems and such.

looking at your first post.. it isn't a loose or flat cmos battery?

HaQue: Thanks for the suggestion, but that was on the old mobo. I tried so many batteries and made sure they were properly fitting.

ShaneWard: Would do, but the CMOS problems make the old mobo unusable and I've already tried many configurations before giving up on it. Thanks for suggesting tho.

have you tried the seatools utility to check it?

http://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/spinpoint-f-series/

I hadn't, but have now. Seatools seems very like HDDScan, very similar tests. Both utils couldn't find any fault with the drive. Thanks for the suggestion.

I've ordered a WD 1TB Blue Sata drive. Should arrive tomorrow. If that cures the problem so be it. If it doesn't I will probably need a new power supply - in that case I will have two 1TB drives for data, one for "live" data, the other for backups. So, just have to wait for the nice chap from Amazon to bring the package and I'll know where I'm at.

Thanks again for all the suggestions. I will add an update once I get things sorted out.

HDAT2 can disable/enable PUIS (Power Up In Standby).

You would need to start it with the "/w" switch in order to wake up your drive, ie ...

HDAT2 /w

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

That's what I suspect especially since they then posted "I can spindown/spinup using HDDScan"


Loki

Thanks one and all for the helpful suggestions.
The new WD 1TB Blue drive has arrived, is installed and works beautifully. Backups are being copied as I type. So, it wasn't the power supply.

It is likely to be:
- the Samsung is faulty
or
- some sort of missmatch between the mobo BIOS and Samsung
or
- something to do with "Power up in standby" as suggested above (which I need to spend more time to fully understand)

I will have a go at getting the Samsung working again later and, if successful, I'll use it as a backup drive. But for now at least I'm up and running again and can get some work done.
Thanks again to all.

www.hdat2.com



Loki

Good news. Sometimes it is best to just move on and not try and solve everything

You've already done the hard part. Copying HDAT2 to the flash drive and running it is the easy part.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.