Motherboard Diagnostic

I have been experiencing a series of issues that while appear to have been due to bad hard drives, I'm beginning to suspect something more. The problems have ranged from high mortality rates on Seagate 7200.11 drives (which are known to have problems), to two out of three WDC1002FAEX drives having bad blocks soon after installation, and now a series of problems with Linux distros on multiple types of HDDs.

Some time back, after finding that Kubuntu 10.4 was unbootable on my oldest drive (Maxtor 6YO89M0), I just shelved it until recently installing Suse 11.4 on it. A few days later, I had a similar issue with not being able to boot Suse, even after reinstalling it once.

I then bought a new WD5001AALS, and after running tests on it with HD Tune, I tried Suse 11.4 on it once more. Then when attempting to boot it a bit earlier today, it displayed a similar GRUB error as to the ones experienced previously, except that instead of it saying that there was a disk read error, it said that there was a hard drive error.

The only thread that I can think of that may weave through all of these problems is something like the drive controller on the motherboard. However, rather than simply doing another R&R, without something more than a hunch to go on, I'm wondering if there is a way to diagnose whether this is actually a problem or not? I do have some diagnostics, but none that I can remember that would actually pinpoint whether a defective condition really existed.

Motherboard make/model would help......

That is what the "My System Specs" link is for, however it is an Asus A8N32-SLI.

I hadn't until now, because I didn't expect it to say anything that HD Tune hadn't already. It did pass the drive on the quick test, and since the extended test is primarily scanning for bad sectors, I have forgone that for thee moment, However it does indicate one issue, regarding the SMART status of the drive not being available...which HD Tune also said. However, looking at the screenshot, it should be noted that the 3 drives without SMART status include my two oldest drives which are questionable in themselves. Yet the two drives that do show SMART status are external drives, which makes me again wonder if there is a motherboard issue involved. I guess that I could move that WDC drive to my external case and see if it continues to have a SMART status problem, but I'm not in the right mindset at the moment. Yet, I wonder how common it is for a new drive not to provide SMART status?

EDIT: The flipside of that is that SpeedFan does show SMART data for all 5 drives.

That interesting. I just ran WD Diagnostics on my system and it picked up all my drives..... including my SSD drive....



Anyway have you checked for the latest drivers for your board? Also a BIOS update?

As for not picking up older drives, not sure about that. If it has SMART info, I think it should be read by the software.

sygnus21 said:

That interesting. I just ran WD Diagnostics on my system and it picked up all my drives..... including my SSD drive....



Anyway have you checked for the latest drivers for your board? Also a BIOS update?

As for not picking up older drives, not sure about that. If it has SMART info, I think it should be read by the software.

I have the latest drivers and BIOS for my motherboard, but that isn't saying much, because they have not updated it in a very long time, and probably never will again, since this board is becoming vintage.

essenbe said:

I am not familar with your board, but my board (Asrock P67 Extreme4) has an option in bios. In Advanced options-storage controllers-enable/disable SMART drive. You may check if you have that option.

I don't recall anything like that in the BIOS, but I will recheck when I reboot next.

seekermeister said:

essenbe said:

I am not familar with your board, but my board (Asrock P67 Extreme4) has an option in bios. In Advanced options-storage controllers-enable/disable SMART drive. You may check if you have that option.

I don't recall anything like that in the BIOS, but I will recheck when I reboot next.

Yeah I started to post that you should check that as well. Good call essenbe.

As for drivers for the board it, well. I know nothing about AMD, but intel based boards get chipset/inf drivers updates all the time from Intel. AMD doesn't do the same?