Total hardware failure!

[JCitron]

Well my BSOD and reboots turned into a total hardware failure last Wednesday. I thought it was a video card driver isse and the machine was running nicely for about a week straight without issues. I went to run a backup from one drive to another, and the machine rebooted again. This time for the last time. It did not come up after that.

I replaced the power supply because the MB wouldn't receive a power-good signal and kept trying to start, but couldn't power up. This did not fix the problem. I ended up replacing the MB with an ASUS P6X58D with a new processor and new video card. What ever happened also took out my two hard drives I had open, which included my backups and my current documents.

My Trainz install survived because that was on a separate hard drive and the drive wasn't open when the system crashed.

Very frustrated and discouraged at the moment.

John

 

[wholbr]

Hi John.
Keep your spirits up John, it happens to the best of us and you are one of the best of us. We know how you feel it is not the loss of the computer that matters so much is the loss of all the data and programs that are on it that really hits you.

It's a shame that you do not live here in Britain as I have a computer that has reasonable specs that's been sitting in a spare bedroom for the last six months. It was given to me by the wife of a former work colleague following his death in the middle of last year. If there was any way of getting it to you it would certainly be all yours.

Anyway, if there is one person in the world who will come out with this smelling of roses I have no doubts it will be you. As said, keep the pecker up and nose to the grindstone and I am sure you will figure it out.

Bill.

 

[djt]

Well my BSOD and reboots turned into a total hardware failure last Wednesday. I thought it was a video card driver isse and the machine was running nicely for about a week straight without issues. I went to run a backup from one drive to another, and the machine rebooted again. This time for the last time. It did not come up after that.

I replaced the power supply because the MB wouldn't receive a power-good signal and kept trying to start, but couldn't power up. This did not fix the problem. I ended up replacing the MB with an ASUS P6X58D with a new processor and new video card. What ever happened also took out my two hard drives I had open, which included my backups and my current documents.


Very frustrated and discouraged at the moment.

John

I thought you told us that you went with a socket 1156/P55 setup because of issues with the socket 1366/X58 that you read about at Newegg.com (none of which I’ve experienced with either of my i7 socket 1366/X58 setups).

So you went with entirely new platform (i7 socket 1366/X58 chipset)?

John,

I just went hardware shopping myself and built a pretty expensive rig, but then again I don't fancy a hardware upgrade for at least another 4 years if I can help it.

From what I was reading about the the i7 Bloomfield chips, and the supporting 1366 motherboards, there seems to be a lot of problems with them still at this stage. The motherboards seem to have a lot of timing issues related to them from what I can tell. I was a hardware technician for many years, and this is what many of the problems appear to be. The users complain a lot about unreliable start up issues, and other weird memory problems.

So having said that, I opted for a slightly slower, but more stable P55 chipset and the Intel i7 1168 pin chip. These are relatively new, but the stability seems to be better.

John

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?p=580624#post580624

 

[JCitron]

Hi John.
Keep your spirits up John, it happens to the best of us and you are one of the best of us. We know how you feel it is not the loss of the computer that matters so much is the loss of all the data and programs that are on it that really hits you.

It's a shame that you do not live here in Britain as I have a computer that has reasonable specs that's been sitting in a spare bedroom for the last six months. It was given to me by the wife of a former work colleague following his death in the middle of last year. If there was any way of getting it to you it would certainly be all yours.

Anyway, if there is one person in the world who will come out with this smelling of roses I have no doubts it will be you. As said, keep the pecker up and nose to the grindstone and I am sure you will figure it out.

Bill.

Thank you, Bill for the thoughts. I'm in the process of reinstalling on new hardware. Hopefully the little green men will stay away this time. This is the first time I've ever seen this type of failure in all the years of using computers. Apparently the power supply failed and there was no protection on the output lines to kill the surge. This is what we get for having inexpensive computer parts these days.

I have to admit the worsed part of all this is the loss of data. There are some things that I've lost this time that I'll never get back again. These were things that were in the queue to be backed up on the day of the failure.

John

 

[JCitron]

I thought you told us that you went with a socket 1156/P55 setup because of issues with the socket 1366/X58 that you read about at Newegg.com (none of which I’ve experienced with either of my i7 socket 1366/X58 setups).

So you went with entirely new platform (i7 socket 1366/X58 chipset)?






http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?p=580624#post580624

djt,

The reason for the change is simple. The hardware has finally settled in to a consistent level. Back in March last year, when I built my system they were still very unstable. Now that the manufacturers have the knack down properly, the hardware is as good as the older P55-chipset and 765 Cpus.

The other reason was time and needing to get up and running faster. I chose the quickest and easiest way to get up and running as fast a possible, and didn't want to have to hunt down the hardware all over again. I read quite a few good reviews, and not just on NE, about my current MOBO. This was enough to convince me that it was worth upgrading since I was replacing hardware.

I've been involved with computer hardware since the early 1980s and have seen many kinds of errors and problems, and this one has baffled me. The only thing I can think of, as I mentioned in the thread above is that the PS had a short of some kind and didn't have any kind of protection on the out put leads of the +5V and +12 lines.

John

 

[SuperFudd]

Before scraping the PC, consider the simular problem I had with my previous PC.
The heart of the problem was the main board connector my power supply connected to. Even though 3 pins were used for the 5 Volt current, the pins were not of high enough quality to handle the current. The resistance across the connection was enough to generate a small amouint of heat. After several years this accelerated corrosion on the contacts increasing the resistance, generating still more heat and voltage drop, increasing the rate of corrosion, etc.
Finally the voltage drop across the contacts/connection became too great leaving not enough voltage to the main board causing erratic failures and then HD data corrupion causing failure to boot.
The cause was obvious when I unpluged the power supply and observed the discolored pins.
I found a way to wire around the connection and had the HD "fixed". This worked well enough to transfer data to my new, now current PC.

 

[djt]

djt,

The reason for the change is simple. The hardware has finally settled in to a consistent level. Back in March last year, when I built my system they were still very unstable. Now that the manufacturers have the knack down properly, the hardware is as good as the older P55-chipset and 765 Cpus.

John

The socket 1366/X58 chipset based platform was released in late 2008, the socket 1156/P55 platform was released long after the i7 1366/X58 platform.


In addition the socket 1156/P55 platform has just been replaced with the new socket LGA-1155/P67 chipset.

 

[JimDep]

Wow John,

I'm sorry to hear about the PC problems and loss of stored data. Good luck getting this resolved ASAP!

Jim

 

[SnakeLight64]

Hi JCitron,

I have a few questions to ask, as i know a lot about computers...
1: How many watts is your power supply unit? and what make is it?
2: What video card do you have?
3: Have you tried changing your RAM? (Most BSODs are because of RAM issues)

 

[wholbr]

Hi John and Everybody
I am afraid I cannot help with the technical side of this as I am no computer expert and always get a computer shop in the town to sort my problems out and tell me when I need an upgrade or a better computer to handle whatever it is I am trying to do.

However, when I was working full-time we had a computer in the office on which we kept the results of court test case rulings. The hard drive on that “gave up the ghost” altogether and rather suddenly one day and all attempts to revive it failed.

We sent the hard drive of to some company who specialized in the retrieval of data from hard drives like ours, where they retrieved everything by taking out the discs and somehow reading them. They then put all the data on a new hard drive and sent it back to us.

The cost of the above was very reasonable (we all considered it cheap in fact) and I am sure the same service could be obtained in America.

Just an observation from an amateur, but hope this helps.

Bill

 

[clam1952]

John,

Are both drives completely dead?

If they are check their PCB's for a burnt out track or blown diode, you may be able to bridge it and get them running long enough to recover the data.

If they are still working just scrambled or the data has vanished then I'd suspect maybe the partition tables have been corrupted, sometimes running a partitioner program, not Microsofts disk manager, on the disk will enable you to recover by using the backup copy.

The Ultimate boot CD has a few to play with plus some data recovery and disk fixing tools.

 

[lewisner]

Wholbr said "I am afraid I cannot help with the technical side of this as I am no computer expert and always get a computer shop in the town to sort my problems out and tell me when I need an upgrade or a better computer to handle whatever it is I am trying to do."

I used to run a Packard Bell 6810SLI with two 300GB HDD's. One day the computer crashed utterly and I took it the local PC shop to be repaired.
They told me one of the HDD's was cooked and replaced it with a 320GB HDD at a cost of £60. They also gave me back the old, dead HDD.
It lay gathering dust for a year and a half but recently (having built a new PC) I decided to sell the two working HDD's and wired them up to my current PC so I could use KillDisk to erase the data from them. Out of curiosity I wired the "dead" HDD up and what do you suppose it said? "This device is working properly". Moral...don't always trust computer repair shops

 

[RRSignal]

Replacing the PCB on the drive is a last-resort possibility too, since this is what usually fails anyway. Let me know if you need help with this. Lewisner made a good point though - not all drives that seem to be toast really are and there are a lot of tricks you can try.

 

[wholbr]

Wholbr said "I am afraid I cannot help with the technical side of this as I am no computer expert and always get a computer shop in the town to sort my problems out and tell me when I need an upgrade or a better computer to handle whatever it is I am trying to do."

I used to run a Packard Bell 6810SLI with two 300GB HDD's. One day the computer crashed utterly and I took it the local PC shop to be repaired.
They told me one of the HDD's was cooked and replaced it with a 320GB HDD at a cost of £60. They also gave me back the old, dead HDD.
It lay gathering dust for a year and a half but recently (having built a new PC) I decided to sell the two working HDD's and wired them up to my current PC so I could use KillDisk to erase the data from them. Out of curiosity I wired the "dead" HDD up and what do you suppose it said? "This device is working properly". Moral...don't always trust computer repair shops

Hi Lewisner And Everybody
Lewisner I very much take on board what you say their. However, throughout life you always have to trust somebody or other to take care of things that you do not have the knowledge of to take care of yourself.

For my car, It goes to the local garage. My computer goes down to the local shop or he comes here. Our domestic appliance repairs go to another local shop in the town or to the recycling center whichever the case may be.

Nobody can be an expert in everything and often there is no alternative but to place your trust in somebody else. I always use local businesses and people I have known for a number years. I live in a fairly small community and I am sure no local business would wish to get themselves a bad name as no one would then use them.

The above creates work for people in the community when others like myself do the same thing. I also firmly believe that this work is going to be badly needed in Europe and America in the coming couple of years.

As said, throughout life you always have to trust people at times, and it is what makes the world go round. When you do find someone betrays that trust or treats you badly as a customer, then make sure as many people as you can know about it.

Bill

 

[clam1952]

Replacing the PCB on the drive is a last-resort possibility too, since this is what usually fails anyway. Let me know if you need help with this. Lewisner made a good point though - not all drives that seem to be toast really are and there are a lot of tricks you can try.

Agreed, I have used the replace the PCB on a few occasions, usually a trip to our local PC market and buying a scrap drive or two of the same type / model for a couple of UK pounds and using the PCB will work. Incidentally, often the so called "Scrap non working" drives sold at this market by a local PC repairer, after a run through the manufacturers checking / fixing / format software, are fine, I think that says it all about his actual repair skills ........

 

[lewisner]

Hi Lewisner And Everybody
Lewisner I very much take on board what you say their. However, throughout life you always have to trust somebody or other to take care of things that you do not have the knowledge of to take care of yourself.

For my car, It goes to the local garage. My computer goes down to the local shop or he comes here. Our domestic appliance repairs go to another local shop in the town or to the recycling center whichever the case may be.

Nobody can be an expert in everything and often there is no alternative but to place your trust in somebody else. I always use local businesses and people I have known for a number years. I live in a fairly small community and I am sure no local business would wish to get themselves a bad name as no one would then use them.

The above creates work for people in the community when others like myself do the same thing. I also firmly believe that this work is going to be badly needed in Europe and America in the coming couple of years.

As said, throughout life you always have to trust people at times, and it is what makes the world go round. When you do find someone betrays that trust or treats you badly as a customer, then make sure as many people as you can know about it.

Bill

True but one thing I have learnt is the value of searching out reviews of shops (high street or online) and products. In the case of the PC shop I spoke of there wasn't much choice anyway since it is pretty much the only PC shop (bucket shop) in York.
I did find some reviews and one described the guys as "ignorant" whilst another said "they are good at wiring things up bot much else!".

BTW here are the reviews of the shop http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/place...0&ved=0CDYQtQU&sa=X&ei=eqcrTeDdOIq4jAfmlt33CA

 

[lewisner]

Agreed, I have used the replace the PCB on a few occasions, usually a trip to our local PC market and buying a scrap drive or two of the same type / model for a couple of UK pounds and using the PCB will work. Incidentally, often the so called "Scrap non working" drives sold at this market by a local PC repairer, after a run through the manufacturers checking / fixing / format software, are fine, I think that says it all about his actual repair skills ........

I mentioned elsewhere the problems I had with a "Firelite" 80GB external HDD which I bought when these things were expensive. I dropped it and it stopped working. I served an apprenticeship as a maintenance fitter so I stripped down (handling it with kid gloves) but no luck.
I searched and searched for a solution to the problem till one guy said "take it out of the enclosure and tap it lightly with your knuckles in the centre". I did and it lit up and worked! How much would a Data Recovery firm have charged me?

 

[JCitron]

I mentioned elsewhere the problems I had with a "Firelite" 80GB external HDD which I bought when these things were expensive. I dropped it and it stopped working. I served an apprenticeship as a maintenance fitter so I stripped down (handling it with kid gloves) but no luck.
I searched and searched for a solution to the problem till one guy said "take it out of the enclosure and tap it lightly with your knuckles in the centre". I did and it lit up and worked! How much would a Data Recovery firm have charged me?

Hi all.

@SuperFudd - the motherboard was only 6 months and there was no trace of anything burned on it. I've seen that though with poor connections. I used to repair video terminals and sometimes the connectors, where the power supply would connect to the PCB, would be burned.

@Bill - I've thought about sending the C drive out for repair. At least I can get my current stuff back, hopefully. The other drive, well even though it was historical data, I was going to do some clean-up on it anyway, so I guess this is really cleaned up now!

@djt - I know this isn't the latest and greatest of hardware, but I never go for the latest and greatest. I find that if I wait a little bit then the bugs get worked out and the hardware is quite stable. Having worked as a technician for over 25 years, plus getting older, has made me a bit more cautious that I used to be. I don't want to be bothered by constant tweaking and poking. I'd rather get the system up and running and get on with other things. I managed 14 file servers for over 10 years with one of them close to 14 years old. When the company closed in 2009, all machines were still operational, and still running quite well.

@Clam - I tried swapping the PCB from another drive and got a clicking sound and a power up on the dead drive. This is somewhat of a good sign. I'm planning on sending this drive out for repair.

@SnakeLite - This was an EVGA Classic P55 MOBO - brand new
The video card was an EVGA GTX470. The power supply was a CoolMax 1300W, so there was plenty of power to drive the components. The system was about 6 months old. The Mobo and video card are under warranty, and I plan on sending those back for replacement.

The good news is that my drive with my Trainz install remained intact, so I was able to reinstall that quickly and get up and running again. I use no other games on the computer and use it for school work, some video and music editing, and some 3D modeling.

At this point, I'm sucking it up and getting on with it. There's no sense in fretting over what happened. It still baffles me as to what really happened. I keep thinking it was the PS, but really I'm not so sure. It could easily have been a shorted voltage regulator on the motherboard that could do the same thing. Who knows, and I don't have the schmatics, scope, prints, or a magnifying glass strong enough to see the traces on the board to test it.

John

 

[SuperFudd]

There was no indication of anything burned on my old PC. It took 7 years to fail.

 

[djt]

@djt - I know this isn't the latest and greatest of hardware, but I never go for the latest and greatest.
John

The socket 1156/P55 platform you just replaced was the “latest” from Intel when you first mentioned it last summer. The socket 1366/X58 system you just replaced the 1156/P55 setup with is still currently considered Intel’s “enthusiast's/performance” or “greatest” platform.

I find that if I wait a little bit then the bugs get worked out and the hardware is quite stable.

That contradicts your decision to go with the socket 1156/P55 platform to begin with doesn’t it? The socket 1366/X58 platform already had a year of maturity before 1156/P55 was even released.

I managed 14 file servers for over 10 years with one of them close to 14 years old. When the company closed in 2009, all machines were still operational, and still running quite well.

That’s great but what do the demands of running “file servers” on 14 years old hardware have in common with running games?