My son brought over his friend's "sick" PC last night. It is a homebuilt, water cooled AMD Phenom II x 6 based system with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, nVidia GTX 9800 video card, Corsair 550 watt power supply and a NZXT case, 2 DVD burners and 3 SATA hard drives (80GB boot, Win7; 500GB data, 1TB data), built on a GigaByte GA-880GA-UD3H_Rev_2.2 motherboard.
The system would boot into Win7, then randomly crash with a screen that was colored with lines all over it, no BSOD's. Sometimes, the PC would crash when loading Win7 and sometimes it would run for a few minutes and then crash.
I went into the BIOS and set it to "fail safe default" since I diidn't know if/what the builder did with overclocking, etc... and started basic troubleshooting. As I was about to hook up a know good WD Raptor hard drive from my bench to run diagnostics on the system, we saw that the SATA data connector on the Seagate 1TB hard drive had broken off and the cable was just barely connected to the hard drive. The plastic part of the SATA data connector was still in the cable and the bare data pins were showing at the rear of the hard drive.
I powered it down, removed the damaged hard drive and then powered the PC back up and all was fine, no crashes or anything. I hooked the hard drive to an external SATA hard drive caddy and played with it until I got my PC to see the drive (NOT EASY!!) and copied 900GB of data (mostly games) off the damaged Seagate hard drive. I had not seen a case when the failing hard drive caused this type of problem in Win7 and I wanted to share thus experience with your folks in case you're ever in a similar situation...
The system would boot into Win7, then randomly crash with a screen that was colored with lines all over it, no BSOD's. Sometimes, the PC would crash when loading Win7 and sometimes it would run for a few minutes and then crash.
I went into the BIOS and set it to "fail safe default" since I diidn't know if/what the builder did with overclocking, etc... and started basic troubleshooting. As I was about to hook up a know good WD Raptor hard drive from my bench to run diagnostics on the system, we saw that the SATA data connector on the Seagate 1TB hard drive had broken off and the cable was just barely connected to the hard drive. The plastic part of the SATA data connector was still in the cable and the bare data pins were showing at the rear of the hard drive.
I powered it down, removed the damaged hard drive and then powered the PC back up and all was fine, no crashes or anything. I hooked the hard drive to an external SATA hard drive caddy and played with it until I got my PC to see the drive (NOT EASY!!) and copied 900GB of data (mostly games) off the damaged Seagate hard drive. I had not seen a case when the failing hard drive caused this type of problem in Win7 and I wanted to share thus experience with your folks in case you're ever in a similar situation...
My Computer
At a glance
Microsoft Windows 8.1 Enterprise 64-bitIntel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 4.7GHz (Over...32 GB 12800 DDR3 Crucial Ballistix SportNVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 SC x 2 (SLI) by EVGA
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
- Computer Manufacturer/Model Number
- Intel DZ77GA-70K
- OS
- Microsoft Windows 8.1 Enterprise 64-bit
- CPU
- Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 4.7GHz (Overclocked)
- Motherboard
- Intel Corporation DZ77GA-70K, 0066 BIOS version
- Memory
- 32 GB 12800 DDR3 Crucial Ballistix Sport
- Graphics Card(s)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 SC x 2 (SLI) by EVGA
- Sound Card
- (1) Bluetooth Hands-free Audio (2) NVIDIA High Definition
- Monitor(s) Displays
- LG 27" HDMI
- Screen Resolution
- 12920 x 1080 x 32 bits (4294967296 colors) @ 60Hz
- Hard Drives
- Intel 120GB SSD (ATA INTEL SSDSC2CT12 SCSI Disk Device)
Western Digital Caviar Black 64M cache 2TB 7200rpm (ATA WDC WD2002FAEX-0 SCSI Disk Device), 3 x WD 150Gb 10k Velociraptor hard drives in RAID 0 (testing)
- PSU
- Corsair 750w fully modular
- Case
- Corsair 650D with perforated side panel
- Cooling
- 3 200mm case fans, Intel liquid cooling for CPU w 120mm fans
- Keyboard
- Logitech backlit
- Mouse
- Dell
- Internet Speed
- 11Mbps DSL
- Antivirus
- Windows Defender, MalWareBytes Pro and CCleaner Pro
- Browser
- Chrome, IE and FireFox (latest versions)
- Other Info
- Windows Home Server 2011 with 10 clients at home
