Impending system failure?

Hey everyone,

Been having recurrent system freezes over the last couple of weeks.  On reset..

CPU OK

Memory OK

and then hangs on the following screen:

SATA 378 TX2 plus Bios version 1.00.0.33 Promise Technology 2002-2005

Unable to even access the Bios when this happens despite multiple resets.  However, if I completely shut everything down and perform a hard reboot the system starts up fine.  This appears to either be the end of the road for the SATA controller or the motherboard itself.  There have been no updates to the above Bios and everything else is fully updated.  All other hardware components appear to be checking out.  Any other suggestions?  Should I consider getting another SATA contoller to plug into a PCI slot?

I would love to build a new system, but I do not have the time or money currently.  Thanks in advance for everyone's help.

I'm not really sure what's wrong with your PC, but I think your best bet is to backup all your data incase it does fail. It's always better to be safe than sorry.

I would say it sounds like your North or south Bridge is going out depending on where the SATA controller is. But north bridges also endure more heat generally than anything but a graphics card. I would go get a little North/South bridge cooler kit and drop it on the north bridge. Just as a note you can often find chipset cooling sets with at least 2 heatsinks and a single fan setup. I would grab one of those usually under 15 bucks and try it out. Even if it doesn't work you can keep it for later, I would also change out your bios battery (the round one on the MB0 usually gotten for under 5 dollars at a grocery store).

My Northbridge (Silver Heatsink Labeled ASUS) feel warm to touch, but not hot.  I already have a 5 fans installed in my Antec SoHo server case not including the 2 heatsink fans on my processors and 1 fan on my videocard.  I have a side fan blowing on the video card, NorthBridge, and Southbridge (just below the PCI slots and above the SATA ports in the picture above).  1 fan blowing on the SATA ports and Southbridge, and an additional fan blowing directly on my Harddrives.  

Average system temp is 45 C and never goes above 52 C 

Average CPU temps 34-37 C and never above 60 C, but this was during a stress diagnostic maxing out the CPUs, memory and video card. 

I initially thought this fan set-up was overkill (system has been fine since build in October 2003, except for PSU failure in 2007).  I can consider placing a larger fan on the access door to further increase air flow, but there probably is not enough room to place a fan directly on the NorthBridge.  

Would a larger fan help help? System really doesn't appear to be running hot.  My last system ran at close to 80 C for 3 years, but that's another story.  By the way, how would changing the Bios battery affect things, it appears to be OK.

Thanks for the help

The first thing that came to mind when the system crashed was... do I have everything backed up? I think I do... actually this was the second thing that ran through my head... the first was... "oh crap"

Thanks for your help

You sure do have a lot of hard drives there... try unplugging a few... 1 bad hard drive could cause the system to hang.

What exactly is your HDD configuration? Which one are you booting from? Are you running RAID? Either way I would suggest running diagnostics on all of them. But please do provide more info.

Your sata drives report to the sata controller which then talks to the Southbridge. The south bridge then talks to the North Bridge which then talks to the CPU. All of  your input devices, including PCI slots, talk to the South Bridge... so if your Southbridge was going bad... you'd be experiencing all kinds of problems. The SATA controller could be going bad, but I suspect a bad hard drive.

All drives check out diagnostically.  System disk is the 30GB...that's where my Boot.ini is.  This is an ATA 80pin HD.  This is my oldest drive.  I've thought about replacing, but for some reason it is really difficult to change the location of the system disk on this motherboard.  I think it needs to be an ATA.  My Boot disk is where my operating system is.  This is my newest drive and is a SATA 320GB.  The other two drives are back-up drives I use for random data.  By the way because I do frequent system diagnostics I have different OS versions on each different drive as well, but for actual useage the above two drive are the only ones I really use.  When I build my new computer everything will be on RAID 0+1, but that is another story. 

Fortunately, the problem though intermittent is not all the time, yet.  I've also cut down on my diagnostics that would really tax the system as is.  I wish this were just a hard drive issue. As you can see I have plenty lying around as well as two externals.  However, I do not think that a bad hard drive would cause a crash and then this type of reboot failure. 

If the issue were the SATA controller or the boot disk I should still be able to get to the Boot.ini which is on a separate system disk on an ATA controller.  Since I have multiple operating systems I could boot from any of the other boot disks in my tower.  If the system disk were to fail then I would get an error stating unknown system disk or please install system disk...I have gotten this error message in the past when trying to move the system disk or changing over to a different disk to use as the system disk.  I know this sounds a little convoluted, but I've been up and running for almost 5 years straight with minimal issues and don't really have time to start my array from scratch with a new Boot.ini though I probably should.

Is there a way to perform a diagnostic on the North or South Bridge directly?

If this keeps happening I will likely get a new drive and start from scratch, but reinstalling everything will take hours and be really painful. It would be especially painful if the drives were not the issue in the first place.

Please let me know if you have any other ideas.  Thanks for the input.

joeaekdb:

I do not think that a bad hard drive would cause a crash and then this type of reboot failure. 

A bad hard drive would DEFINITELY cause the issues you are describing. If it hangs at the SATA Controller, that means either the SATA controller is bad... or it is having trouble reading one of your SATA Hard drives.

I have diagnosed and fixed literally THOUSANDS of computers. Hardware specifically is my specialty. Don't EVER discount ANY component in a computer for causing a problem. Hard drives can cause nothing to appear on the screen at all, it can cause the system to hang at POST, it can cause blue screens, reboots, all kinds of problems.

I've seen an internal webcam on a laptop cause the screen to turn White, get intensely hot and shut the computer off. Then the computer would NOT turn back on until the webcam was disconnected, then the problem would go away. Swapped out the internal webcam and the problem went away completely. You don't want to know how many sticks of ram, Mainboards, and CPUs I had to go through not to mention the hours spent to figure out that was the problem. I was lucky to have an entire depot of parts at my disposal :-)

I'm not trying to brag or anything... i'm just trying to prove a point that you can't ever count anything out.

But back to your problem, HDD diagnostics only test the platters on the HDD. If something else is wrong with them such as the read/write head occasionally sticks, or something is wrong with the board in the HDD, then sometimes these problems don't show up. The only sure way to test if a HDD is causing your problem is to remove 1 drive at a time and see if the problem goes away. The trouble with this process is your problem doesn't happen all the time. So you're just gonna have to wait til it happens... or doesn't happen again with a drive out. Or find a way to MAKE it happen, until it doesn't happen with a certain hardware setup(if that makes sense).