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[gimlet]

Did you run memtest on the new memory?
And you ever test the whole disk drive?   At a MINIMUM get the manufacturer's diagnostics and see if there are any reported SMART errors, and run the SMART tests.

I personally always boot a Linux LiveCD USB stick and run a full badblocks test on every new disk I get - it takes about 1 day per Terabyte of disk, but it's worth it to save HOURS AND HOURS of troubleshooting frustration later on, plus whatever spooky problems it might cause.  Plus I can easily swap the disk during the return period.  And I can run the more rigorous "destructive" badblocks, since there's no data on it yet, but even running the non-destructive one is a simple way to eliminate on potential problem.

After those 2 things, ugh, I guess try looking in the event logs to see if there are any clues in there, if you find something promising google it and see if you can get more info...

Then, maybe, boot a LiveCD and run some stress tests, that way you can at least start to narrow it down to the hardware since you will eliminate your Windows installation from the puzzle.

[sjm9876]

I'm getting a new PC soon, and it has an SSD in addition to the HD. Now I know, SSD is limited writes, and I'd like it to last as long as possible - apart from the OS, what sort of things should I be putting on it? And are there any things I definitely should not put on it?

[Lord Shonus]

"Limited Writes" is kind of a misleading term nowadays. A modern SSD will last about as long as a conventional hard drive under conventional use. Put your OS (for faster booting) and any programs or games that you run a lot and take a long time to load from disc on it, and redirect your documents folder to the magnetic drive. Just remember that it is very small by modern hard drive standards.

[Tellemurius]

as long as you keep about 15-20% space free on the SSD it will last just as long for a hard drive. Setup folder redirection (syslinks) to move your documents and stuff onto the hard drive that way windows still recognizes the file location. Also i recommend moving the Page File onto the hard drive, for me it locks up the SSD constantly and isn't advise to turn it off.

[Lightningfalcon]

I'm getting ready to set up a VMware windows workstation, which I will use as a playing bed.  In all likelihood, I see it being infected with a great multitude of viruses and trojans.  Are there any precautions that I should take to prevent possible contamination with the other computers in my house?  I've used VMware many, many times before, but it was always with premade images that had no chance of affecting the computer we were using it on. 

[Tellemurius]

I'm getting ready to set up a VMware windows workstation, which I will use as a playing bed.  In all likelihood, I see it being infected with a great multitude of viruses and trojans.  Are there any precautions that I should take to prevent possible contamination with the other computers in my house?  I've used VMware many, many times before, but it was always with premade images that had no chance of affecting the computer we were using it on. 

Either to give it its own separate internet connection or make sure none of your drives are viewable in the virtual machine you should be fine.

[Jopax]

So I thought I'd just completely wipe the HDD, make new partitions and do a clean install of windows for starters, mostly because I thought the issue was mainly with them.

Cue the PC crashing during the formatting and now just sitting there, quietly buzzing but completely unresponsive.

Seriously tempted to just give it to a shop so they can fuck around with it instead of me, but they've done a shoddy job of fixing it before so that's not much of an option :I

Oh well, not like I have anything better to do than spend the day troubleshooting this thing (I do actually but hey, who the fuck needs birthday presents anyways)

Edit:

Also, on startup, it occassionally throws out a "DQS training failed on previous boot, reversing to slower DRAM speed" message, I'm thinking it's related to the crashing but I'm not entirely sure.

[Thief^]

Try disabling DQS in the bios, it sounds like an automatic overclocking thing, which is *not* what you want for stability.

EDIT: Make sure the settings for RAM in the bios match the specs for the RAM you're using.

[gimlet]

You'll spend all kinds of time trying to paper over problems by reformatting, but you won't spend the similar amount of effort to learn and use hardware diagnostic tools that could help you narrow down this and potential future problems.  *boggle*

I'll list 'em again, so maybe other people in this situation might learn:
manufacturer's SMART diagnostics
Linux LiveCD on bootable USB has memtest and badblocks.  Especially since you already nuked it, the very thorough "destructive" flag for badblocks is worth the time to test the whole drive.
If that all works, stress/heat test the CPU and then memory with Prime95, and then the graphics card with something like Furmark or Valley.
OCCT,which I have not used but hear good reports on, has a test that will stress the CPU and GPU simultaneously.  If you can run this for a while then your Power Supply is probably OK (warning, this has been reported to kill cheap PSUs)

If you get a new computer, or new parts, it's WELL worth investing the time to do this stuff while you're still in the return period, before trusting hundreds of hours of work to potentially dodgy hardware.  In the last few years, about 15% of the memory and 20% of the disk drives I bought (all new, not used) fail the diagnostics right out of the box. 

Sorry for the rant :p   But let me mention my other pet peeve - if you're building your own, spend $2 on ebay and buy a piezo speaker (look for "motherboard speaker" or "motherboard piezo speaker" so you can listen to the bios beeps and maybe get a clue to what's failing instead of dead silence).

2nd ED:  The memtest/drive diagnostics are OK on laptops, but I'd skip or SEVERLY limit the CPU/GPU stress tests because laptops have notoriously awful cooling, and this is just asking for trouble.  Even if you're monitoring the temperatures carefully, it's a definite risk.

[Sinistar]

-snip-

Yeah, that's what I was/am afraid of too.

However.
Run official disk check from Seagate (SeaTools for DOS) and the disk passed the extended test with flying colors.

What's more, today and yesterday I decided to try and reproduce that system freeze while running SpeedFan and DPC Latency Checker AND while playing M&B: WFaS (as this was where the problems were first encountered). And not only did I not discover anything out of ordinary (running M&B windowed, checking stats at the same time), the drive was more silent than priest's buttocks during the mass. Tried the same thing today but run M&B fullscreen for few hours and still nothing (if we discard one unusually high DPC reading, but even so, I didn't notice anything while playing... unless if for whatever reasons it happened while I was away at lunch and the computer was more under no load whatsoever)

Hummm. I'll go run memtest next then I guess I'll try just everything gimlet has suggested. Nothing to loose.
Thanks both for the info.

edit: Well shiiiieeeet. Memtest passed 4 times in a row without an error.

[Elvang]

I've got a couple old 1TB hard drives nearing capacity that I need to back up, as they are several years old and have seen extensive use. Looking at current hard drives though has kind of scared me off buying new ones, as even the recommended brands/lines seem to have numerous problems and bad reviews (lots of DOA, refurbished replacements DOA, multiple failures within the first couple months, etc; anything over 1TB seem to have high failure rates?).

Looking around, the Western Digital Reds seem to be the best right now, but are listed as NAS drives. Can they be used in towers like regular drives? If not, I wouldn't mind trying a NAS setup, since I'm interested in some redundancy and the drives will be mostly used to backup files from a couple LAN PCs. Any recommendations would be appreciated, as my hard drive experience starts and stops with a handful of Western Digital Blacks and Blues that have toughed it out solo in towers over the years.

My motherboard supports RAID 0/1/5/10, as far as I can tell, and my case and power supply have room (though I may need a more powerful PSU depending on the drives, I'd want to get another fan as well); I've got a 1TB on one of the two SATA III's right now with 3 3.5" drive bays left, so if I wanted RAID inside I assume I'd go RAID 5 with 3 drives on my unused SATA II's(4)?

[Thief^]

"NAS drives" are just normal drives rated for more use, (generally by using alternate components themselves rated for more use, but the same fundamental design), they should be fine in a desktop.

In my experience, one of the contributors to reliability is the number of "platters" in the drive. If you are familiar with the concept of RAID-0, and you think of a hard-disk as being a raid-0 of the internal platters, you'll see some of the reason. As each platter can only hold so much, a higher-capacity drive will necessarily have more platters, and be less reliable as a result. A while back, the best single-platter drive was a 500GB Samsung Spinpoint (F3?), now apparently Western Digital do a range of single-platter 1TB drives, which may explain the advice you've seen for the 1 TB Western Digital Red, and the high failure rate you've found for >1TB drives.

EDIT: If you're making a raid set, RAID 5 most definitely offers the best balance between redundancy, cost and capacity, although it can use a fair amount of cpu when doing heavy writes (and can be quite slow reading/rebuilding after a disk failure).

[Jopax]

And I'm back.

So the instal was somewhat successful. The Windows worked and all, but one partition is inaccessible. As in, I formatted and deleted it and it didn't allow me to make it a partition again, spewing out some error message.

So I finally got Hirens and tooled around with it for most of the day, mostly to no success (because they either didn't work or I used them improperly, which is somewhat wierd since I followed the instructions for the most part), then I ran the manufacturer HDD test it had and it did two tests (the whole, check and attempt to fix thing) turning up zero issues.

So, once again, I try to install Windows to get the inaccessible partition and it now does so without trouble. Except it BSOD's during installation and now is giving me shit again and refusing to boot at all.


Edit: Also no sign of anything remotely similar to DQS in the BIOS, so I have no idea what the hell am I supposed to do in regards to that.

[Tellemurius]

"NAS drives" are just normal drives rated for more use, (generally by using alternate components themselves rated for more use, but the same fundamental design), they should be fine in a desktop.

In my experience, one of the contributors to reliability is the number of "platters" in the drive. If you are familiar with the concept of RAID-0, and you think of a hard-disk as being a raid-0 of the internal platters, you'll see some of the reason. As each platter can only hold so much, a higher-capacity drive will necessarily have more platters, and be less reliable as a result. A while back, the best single-platter drive was a 500GB Samsung Spinpoint (F3?), now apparently Western Digital do a range of single-platter 1TB drives, which may explain the advice you've seen for the 1 TB Western Digital Red, and the high failure rate you've found for >1TB drives.

EDIT: If you're making a raid set, RAID 5 most definitely offers the best balance between redundancy, cost and capacity, although it can use a fair amount of cpu when doing heavy writes (and can be quite slow reading/rebuilding after a disk failure).

No do not use the Red drives in a desktop. Those hard drives are designed to be put in a NAS system where they are always on, the constant spindowns from idling is bad for these drives and alot of people complained about them failing early. Just stick with the Blue or Black series.

[Thief^]

No do not use the Red drives in a desktop. Those hard drives are designed to be put in a NAS system where they are always on, the constant spindowns from idling is bad for these drives and alot of people complained about them failing early. Just stick with the Blue or Black series.

Quoting Western digital themselves: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810&utm_source=WD%20Red%20redirect&utm_medium=collateral&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=product
"Specifically designed and tested for small office and home office, 1-8 bay NAS systems and PCs with RAID."