BEWARE: long detailed story.

Problem:
i seem to be having trouble with my IDE controller.
it comes out of nowhere.
this is the SECOND mobo that its sprung up on me
i do overclock, but nothing excessive, and keep within the boundaries of what the limits are. (i.e. max Mhz 1475, running 1400, max stable fsb 154, running 140)
it manifests itself as freezes, reboots and data corruption... as such it is most easily brought on by doing data transfer intensive apps. i.e. divx encoding, mp3 encoding, zipping.

it is NOT any of the following.
a. RAM - i have tested this extensively. it occurs regardless of cas 2 or 3. 150, 140 or 133mhz, and im using good PC150 sdram
b. CPU overclock. the problem occurs at stock 1200Mhz, and i have an excellent cpu cooling solution.
c. i dont THINK its my hard drive... the drive passes a detailed DFT with flying colours, and the issue can occur when testing an ARJ archive that was burnt to CD... i.e. litttle/no HDD activity
d. software. has happened on both win2k and 98, and any disk/cd intensive app can possibly do it.
e. dodgey power supply. i have a 550W enermax, and it supplies very clean and stable power.
f. cooling. have a monster MCX-462 cooling the cpu. case is well ventilated, 1 rear high powered 80mm casefan. good front draw. hard drives are warm to touch, nothing hot. northbridge actively cooled, southbridge has a bonus passive HS attached, both are better than typical stock.

i call this problem my creeping doom.
my first motherboard (a7v133) died after 6 months.... it seemed the IDE errors got worse and worse, ironically first at 133Mhz FSB, then spreading to every combo i tried. same as what seems to be happening now. general data corruption and lockups/reboots with disk intensive apps.
at one stage i couldnt even install windows, any windows.
any activity cauzed lockups/bluescreens.

got my new mobo and the issue was gone (iwill KK266-plusR).
been using it for 2 months now, when suddenly 2 weeks ago i started getting similar problems.
at the time i was running at 146 fsb... well below my absolute maximum obtainable of 154.
was doing some DIVX encoding.
so after lots of problem checking, i unplugged my rather old IBM 16GP backup drive, and bingo... problem fixed, or so i thought.
few days later it started again. lockups and reboots when involved in lots of disk accessing.
at the time i also had a big .ARJ file on cd (much like a zip file), and testing that gave CRC errors.
i kept trying this...
and it threw up errors at 146 fsb, 144, even 133 a few times
finally i got some degree of stability at 140. but this is an illusion as i found out tonite. half way thru encoding a divx movie it died again.

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH.
what did i do to deserve this grief????
why can some people live on 160fsb, when i can barely do 154, and now it looks like anything above 140 is dodgey
what IS my problem here???
and how can i fix it for good.

im way out of ideas here.
ive updated all my via drivers.
im gonna reflash my bios with the old version... new one was installed a little before the problems began.
can a drive cauze the chipset to fail???
i think this cauz my FSB limitation is definately drive defined, not PCI card or agp.

help me please!!!
need more info? just ask!

- Know thyself
- Seek
- Love
- Cherish Life
- And do not Yield!

In a word, yes. Certain drives are are more tolerable than others of FSB overclocking. The IBM GXP series has had numerous problems with issues such as this when being overclocked ( or more accurately, running on an IDE controller that is overclocked).

Another Cookie? Who is going to pay my dentist bill?

ok then. sounds reasonable...
but will my issues go away when i replace the 60gxp?

as my 16GP REALLY bit the dust for good last week, im gonna get a new replacement backup drive for all my mp3's.

do u think the problems will go away if i dissconnect all my ibm drives any only use the brand new one?

also... WHAT should i get? im looking for something around 60Gb in 7200rpm.
also knowing that it can tolerate high FSB would be nice.

- Know thyself
- Seek
- Love
- Cherish Life
- And do not Yield!

dont have any links do u???


- Know thyself
- Seek
- Love
- Cherish Life
- And do not Yield!

Where talking a matter of personal preference here now. But I would recomend Maxtor myself, if for no other reason than there RMA process is miles ahead of anyone else's ( we are talking a 2-4 day turnaround).

Another Cookie? Who is going to pay my dentist bill?

mmm ok.

ive been lookin around... and it seems NO-ONE has done any studies into drive overclockability...
odd... we look at just about everything else nowerdays

- Know thyself
- Seek
- Love
- Cherish Life
- And do not Yield!

Now would be the time to clean install Windows XP.

I want to die like my Grandfather...in my sleep...not screaming in terror like his passengers.

i dont see how that would help...
ide errors are ide errors, and i can get them to happen when i boot to dos too.

if i try installing a new OS chances are it will get corrupted too.

least this one is stable as much as it can be

- Know thyself
- Seek
- Love
- Cherish Life
- And do not Yield!