Can't keep a good install - Where's my problem?

[Soylent Joe]

I've been struggling with this issue for about a week now. Really fed up with it so I've just been using the laptop, but I have to get it back up in order to play my games. It's kind of difficult to explain since there any different sides to the issue.

Currently I have Win7 installed on my old 640GB black. Looking for stability, I chose IDE emulation mode instead of AHCI/RAID for this install. Everything is extremely slow, like 3-4 minutes to a usable desktop. Now when I turn it on everything seems fine but it hangs on the Starting Windows screen. I've been able to let it work past that screen, like just now it stayed on it for only about a minute then proceeded to boot up. I've tried the startup repair from the installation disc multiple times, of course it changes nothing. I also did a system restore once when I was able to get it, hoping it would fix the hanging forever, but that didn't work. This problem could simply be the result of the drive dying: HDTune read bench average is just 83 MB/s, it has over 13k hours power on time, but the health and sectors show as O.K.

The reason I switched off of the SSD is that I was sure something was wrong with it. It would quickly give me a message about S.M.A.R.T. being messed up while posting. Then, instead of going to the Starting Windows screen it always would revert to the Vista-style startup screen, which as we know leads into the startup repair that actually gets installed on the disk. There's no way to not go into this repair. I tried resetting the computer and it always jumps right back into that.

When the 640GB drive install was working properly yesterday, I plugged in my SSD to check the health. It passed everything HDTune Pro shows with flying colors, seemed to work perfectly. I proceeded to install Win7 onto the drive again, thinking that it might work. Low and behold, after I restarted some amount of times as we all do while setting up the OS, I again faced the startup repair screen, with no way to avoid it.

So the problem lies somewhere between my motherboard (specifically, the hard disk controller(s)?) and the drives. What really baffles me is how the SSD install gets fucked and goes to that repair no matter how fresh or fail-safe the install, yet passes all disk tests. RMA'ing the SSD isn't really an option since they'll simply send it back to me saying that it's fine, just how OCZ did with my V4.

What do you guys think? What could I do to try to eliminate variables in order to corner the problem and put a name on it? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

[m1dg3t]

Your MoBo/chipset drivers are all up to date? I thought mechanical drives always needed to be in AHCI/RAID mode?

Hope you get it sorted

[scaminatrix]

I had a drive that would allow me to install Windows, drivers and updates, but would then seemingly randomly kill the OS between restarts. I say seemingly random; it would die either while restarting after finishing driver installations or restarting after XP SP3 installation. Drive health was fine and all the other components in the rig were fine (I used them in my next build) so was definitely the drive.

To eliminate the SSD, try it in another rig

[Jetster]

your just going to have to test the parts. memory first

I first thing I would do is run Linux Mint live disk and see how that runs

[Sasqui]

Originally Posted by Soylent Joe

I thought mechanical drives always needed to be in AHCI/RAID mode?

No, they'll work fine in IDE mode. I made that mistake before trying to setup a RAID (i.e. if you don't setup the disks in ACHI mode, you can't use them in RAID)

Soylent Joe... it sounds much like a hardware timeout. A flakey SSD would likely cause something like that.

[Soylent Joe]

Originally Posted by Jetster

your just going to have to test the parts. memory first

I first thing I would do is run Linux Mint live disk and see how that runs

Forgot to mention, I already did something like this. Booted up into a couple different LiveCD's to test the memory and disks before going from the SSD to the 640GB drive. When Windows is working, everything works perfectly. I've played intensive games on it within the last couple days with never any problems.


Putting the SSD in another computer sounds like a good idea. I can put it in my parents' rig and install Windows onto it to see if it can behave itself.

[Black.Raven]

Maybe you should consider installing windows in AHCI. (if you did already sorry.) download newest drivers. once I had an motherboard that got slower and slower, in the end it died. but dont give up yet, you should test everything again, and with different hardware, like onboard video, changing ram positions in the slots. good luck

With Raid you need two exactly the same drives for installing

[ChristTheGreat]

The SSD is a kingston? Updated firmware? Full erase?, Bios updated?

Double check this

[Yo_Wattup]

uhhhh just quietly... maybe it is your windows disk?

Good luck