Phaenius

OK, it's clear that on this forum I will get only mocking. You are not the belly of the universe, although you act like one. I tried to be polite and take it logically, yet all I got was stupid and way off advice. Be it that way, this was my last intervention on this forum. There should be people elsewhere willing to help. That stupid log isn't logging anything, even if you can accept it or not.

No errors related to SATA. What I found was not logged to the timestamp the error occoured, that's why I said nothing. So again, nothing was logged at the time of the blackout. The closest was 48 minutes before. Next advice ? It's clear Event Log won't indicate anything.

Well, first of all, MSFN site couldn't be accessed last days, I checked http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ and it reported site was down for them too. So, I couldn't post. Second, finally the blackouts came back with a vengeance yesterday. Looked into event logs. As suspected, nothing. Hower, I found two interesting things: - 48 minutes before the blackout (but I don't know if related, since it happened with so much in advance), I got the Warning (mind you, warning, not error): "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued." So, I went on and googled this and found out some people experienced this before. Please check this forum thread: http://www.eightforums.com/bsod-crashes-debugging/5868-hang-freeze-update-cpv.html I don't have Intel, so I don't know how to fix this so, if you can tell me how to apply what that guy did to my case, I would be a happy bunny. P.S. Hope MSFN site won't be down again.

I checked various consumption components calculators and they all tell me I need a more powerful power supply, but I also read that most of those calculators are way off most of the time, since they don't take into account for instance the CPU/GPU power compumptions on idle. My CPU and GPU are throttling down when doing nothing or very little and my computer is doing this most of the time, so the power supply should suffice. The blackouts occoured when using very low power (listening to Winamp and/or browsing the web). I could considerring upgrading the PSU, but mostly because I suspect a faulty contact inside, but I need to save money first. I would have wanted to buy a printer instead for those money. The problem with removing components is not that simple. Basically, I can't remove anything else than hard disk drives and the optical drive. Optical drive when it's not working don't know how much can affect the system. The other drives I can remove one by one, but it's a pain in the derriere, since it could pass days before a blackout occour. And I need the drives, can't keep them disconnected for long. That's the problem. I can't reproduce or force the blackouts to happen. But one question remains and hasn't been answered. For my piece of mind, if an S-ATA hard drive runs out of power (power cut) and after 20 secs let's say power resumes, the affected drive will or will not resume normal activity without computer rebooting ? AHCI allows that in principle, but I read it takes more than that to happen.

It's not about the work, it's about the money and the efficiency of this work. The next power supply in line that is cheapest and still retain a fare amount of quality is the upgrade of what I currently have, the Corsair, but 600W instead of 430W. It's considerably more powerful, but it costs 75 euros, unfortunately I can't spend that much just for the sake of having a more powerful PSU (the old one could still deliver the power and I don't know for sure, in fact not even 50% sure that it's faulty). As for flashing the MB firmware, it's a risky job, not reccomended if not neccessarily. Again, no real suspicions. HDDs are reported to be good, by both HDD Sentinel and HD Tune Pro, which are constantly monitor them.

I did that, 315 watts on my wattmater. Of course, average, since I can't see the peaks without an osciloscope (which I don't have). But I fear it could be the soldering on the HDD power wires to the PSU board, after seing (and reading) this review http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=239 Problems is I have to have a certain degree of reasons to replace an otherwise working PSU. Those things don't come cheap. I have a multimeter, I could attach it to a free connector and see if power drops on one of those blackouts. Annoying thing is that non a single one last days. Previously they appeared like 2-3 per hour. Maybe the heat could have dilated the metal and now make better contact ?

No overclock, everything's stock. Only memory sticks have been put to their XMS values. I know those settings are for Intel proccessors, but it works. Default, BIOS sets memory to much lower specs (the default SPD I believe). PSU is one year old, definitely not old and its' 430 W should be more than enough (28A on 12V rail, 20A on 5V and 3.3 rails). Your calculator reccomended 460 W PSU, but I have a wattmetter and it says 170 W power consumption. So, it's ok.

OK, thanks for clearing this up.

So, here it is: Motherboard MSI 970A-G46 http://www.msi.com/product/mb/970A-G46.html CPU AMD FX 6300 http://cpuboss.com/cpu/AMD-FX-6300 RAM 2 X 4 GB Kingston HyperX KHX1600C9D3/4GX http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1831/4/ Graphic card Spphire HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 PCI-E http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/product/?psn=000101&pid=174&lid=1 Sound card Creative Sound Blaster X-FI Platinum FATAL1TY Champion Series http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Blaster-Platinum-FATAL1TY-Champion/dp/B000QYBICE PSU Corsair CMPSU-430CXV2, 430W, ATX2.2 http://www.corsair.com/builder-series-cx430-v2-80plus-certified-power-supply.html Storage Kingston SV300S37A/120G http://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/v/#sv300s3 Seagate Barracuda ST3500320AS http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST3500320AS-Barracuda-7200-11-Cache/dp/B000026D8E Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148840 2 X Seagate Barracuda ST3640323AS http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148335 (Samsung) TSSTCorp CDDVDW SH-222BB http://www.samsung.com/au/consumer/pc-peripherals/optical-disc-drive/dvd-rw/SH-222BB/RSBS OS Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Rest of components I think are unimportant (keyboard, mouse, router, etc.) Edit: OS is installed on SSD Drive. I activated AHCI before I installed Windows. What is ODD ?

OK, I will give the list of components in a jiffy. I was away today and didn't read the comments. And no, no blackouts since... But rest assured, when it happens, I am prepared.

I can't disable AHCI. I tried, but it won't boot. On PCI BUS only a Creative X-Fi sound card.

OK, another mean and mocking post... I don't think I deserve this. I will wait for a blackout to appear and look for the logs and interpret them as much as I can. Meanwhile, you can throw stones, bully, whatever, I don't care. I only know I came here in good faith and didn't want to fight anyone. And that's enough for me. Btw, not the issue, but 6 euros might mean pocket change for you, but situation isn't the same all over the world (not even in Europe). I wouldn't mind if it had some chance in succeeding, but I knew the chances of doing anything good were close (and I mean VERY close) to zero. Still, I pleased you all and bought the cleaning spray. Apart from stinking the room (they could have put some flowers scent in it **** it), it did nothing. As expected.

I don't know why all of you are so mean. It didn't happened since yesterday. I can't force those things. They happen on their own. I am no reluctant by definition. I followed the advice with the cleaning spray, with the testing of sound card, I spent like 6 euros on it and it did nothing (like I suspected). I followed the advice in unbricking the hard disks, it worked, I don't follow you. I am filtering the advices I get and follow the intelligent and plausible ones, dropping the others. I AM waiting for a blackout to happen.

ROTS, I said above, hard disks are always on, they do not sleep. Not even the SSD. When blackouts appear, hard disks do not disappear, icons are there (my computer, tray, Total Commander, etc.) It's just they don't respond. No error returned. At the end of the blackout they resume activity at current time like nothing happened. For instance, if I am listening a file in Winamp, music stops when buffer empties, then when blackout ends, it resumes like usual. There is no "can't read disk" error or anything. From OS point of view, everything is ok, that's why i am reluctant it will appear in the logs. Allen2, that's the issue, from Windows point of view, drives ARE responding. It's just it takes insanely ammounts of time.

I opened Event Viewer, but there are so many entries there, I don't know where to look. Just to search for every entry will take forever, not to mention I won't know even if I find something that could prove useful. The only solution I see is to notice such a "blackout", then look in the event viewer for things that happened at that particular timestamp and report them here. On another note, conducting my own investigation, a hardware problem such as briefly missing power to the disk drives, will or will not be logged by Windows ? Are drives under AHCI able to lose power than resume their activity when back online ? If so, I may have a clue, since it could be a faulty contact along the power cable or the soldering inside the PSU. If not, I should look elsewhere.

By pointing me to a root of a forum, with basicaly all the threads available ? I came here because I thought there are professionals here that can help me.

Is this your way of telling me to go away from this forum ?

Always on, but even on sleep, it should NEVER go to sleep when there is activity. And it should resume in a matter of seconds, certainly not 20-40.

If it has occoured, I missed it. I already said that I don't know what to look for in the entries log. I have summary of administrative events, recently viewed nodes and log summary, each with subchapters.

Well, I have a similar issue with my Creative soundcard (yes, the one that caused so many head scratches in the past), it misses the settings on reboot. It works fine for let's say 1 week (or 1 day), then the next reboot, BAM! it defaults to the stock settings. A curse from me, 2 lost minutes from my life and it's back to how it should be. No big thingy apart from the nerves. Don't know why it does that. It did on my old machine, it does on the new one. Same thing. But it's not that of a problem. But this, with the drives, yeah, it's annoying. I can't replace the PSU just because I have a suspicion, I'm not that rich (even if I were, I would make sure I have reasons to do it, since I don't like to waste money on Window). I simply can't understand why a faulty PSU could stop power to S-ATA drives (ONLY). I even tried before with a PCI card that had a controller and 2 of the 4 drives attached to it. Same thing. When blackout occours, it's for ALL of the drives, no matter that 2 of them actually are controlled by an external PCI controller. I simply can't understand why Windows doesn't sense anything wrong. If I were to simply unplug the power cord from a drive (to try and replicate the problem), than reinsert if after a while, will the affected drive still work or does it need a reboot ? If still works, could be the PSU cable on that branch, since it can simply have a faulty contact on the interior of the cable. But same PSU worked with my old MB, CPU and memory, no issues there.

Jaclaz, that PSU is the first (unfairly) thing to blame by many. And with no reason. It could be, but poor PSU is always to blame when someone runs out of ideas. Why should it be the PSU ? It's Corsair, it's exactly 1 year old, never had reason to suspect it, it has nice ripple and noise, it's a good built. Why should it be the PSU ? I mean, everything else is working correctly when those dropouts. Besides, all the I/O units eats less current than CPU/GPU/memory/motherboard, etc. Really, a HDD consumes very little, SSD and optical unit neglijable, especially I rarely use optical unit and those dropouts don't occour neccessarily when using DVD-RW. How are the drives connected ? That's easy. All are S-ATA compliant, all are connected via S-ATA connectors. DVD-RW is S-ATA rev. 1, all 4 HDDs are S-ATA rev. 2 and SSD is S-ATA rev. 3. Grounding is ok, I screwed the screws correctly. But, if such a problem would have been in place, shouldn't have affected the rest of the computer as well ? I am still waiting for logs, but really, I am so ineffective in reading this, I don't know what area to look. But will try. Just don't make me use isopropyl again.

Well, the technology dates back to at least NT 3.5 (or possibly even 3.1), so you must have lived on another planet or you were so d@mn lucky to never had an issue (possibly hardware related) in all these years :.Surely I had problems, but it never crossed my mind to look there. Thanks for the suggestion. Problem is there are so many categories on those logs, I don't know where to look, but I will delete the logs and look for what happens. Luckily as I am, I won't be surprise at all if nothing will be found in those logs after a such "blackout". But, while watching those logs, what do you think (wild guess) based on your experience, is more of a hardware or software issue ? I mean, can a hardware controller be that faulty that randomly stops working than work again to a point where Windows doesn't sense anything wrong ? Btw, I replaced all cables and I checked everything. Everything seems to be firmly in place.

No, but I NEVAH (in all my 17 years of using PCs) need to use this. OK, I googled before your last post and got Event Viewer opened. What what do I do with this ? It's a lot of info I can't process. Is that something in particular I should be looking for ?

If you can tell me how to do that, I will be much obliged.

I upgraded my motherboard, RAM and CPU about two months ago and also installed a SSD, on which I installed Windows 7 x64 Ultimate as a clean install. I now have a problem never experienced before, that gets very annoying. At random (sometimes in an interval of 1 minute, sometimes several hours), all discs can't be accesed at all for a variable duration (but about 20-40 seconds). All this time, I cannot acces at all ANY disc (SSD, HDD, optical DVD-RW). If some info is cached at the time, I can access, but new information can't be retrieved. I get no error on screen, rest of computer works fine all this time, I get CPU activity, in fact everything is working normally, just I can't access the discs. This is annoying if I want to open a file or stream a audio/video file from HDD, etc. I lose connection. I installed Kaspersky anti-virus and it found nothing wrong. Any ideas what I can do ? Has anyone experienced something like this before ? Is my motherboard controller faulty (i.e. a hardware issue) or could be a software problem ? I used AHCI when installed Windows. After the 20-40 seconds of interruption, everything else resumes like nothing happened. If I tried to open several files, it open (all of them), basically computer takes note and resumes activity. Again, I get no error at all. No sound from discs, nothing. It's a total blackout. I have 1 SSD, 4 HDDs and 1 DVD-RW optical unit. Thanks.