Strange PC restart/freeze issues

Hey everyone,
I’ve run into a bit of a headache. Everything was running smoothly when I was using an IDE hard drive, but things went sideways the moment I swapped it out for a SATA drive. Now, my PC keeps resetting—sometimes every five seconds, other times every four or five hours. I tried switching back to the old IDE drive, and the issue disappeared immediately. I've run several disk scans, and they all claim everything is fine. I'm not sure if this is some kind of issue with the SATA connectors on the motherboard or maybe something else entirely. Has anyone here dealt with something similar?

Thanks in advance!

Maybe try swapping out the SATA cable first to see if that does the trick.

Have you had a chance to check the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status using CrystalDiskInfo yet?

I might give it a shot... Although some forums claim the fix lies within the BIOS settings, I'm not entirely clear on what exactly needs to be done. Hmm.

They’re most likely talking about the SATA controller. You could try switching that setting in the BIOS to see if it helps—though, honestly, I wouldn't hold my breath. If it does change things, you’ll probably end up needing to wipe the drive and do a clean install of Windows anyway (assuming your motherboard actually supports SATA in the first place).

By the way, why don't you drop your full system specs here? It might help us get a better idea of what we're dealing with..

Yeah, good call mentioning that controller. I couldn't find anything related to it in the BIOS, though. I went ahead and enabled all the SATA options available. I'm working with a pretty ancient board here: a Dell Inspiron.

I'll give that a shot... Thanks for the help.

The board really ought to let you toggle from IDE to SATA mode.

Back in the day, you’d run into issues with laptops where you had to switch the hard drive to SATA mode before you could even start the Windows installation 🙂 (specifically with Windows XP and for a little while during Vista).
I never dealt with that kind of headache once Windows 7 came around.

If you’ve already combed through every single setting in your BIOS and there's absolutely no mention of SATA
, then it simply isn't there.

I want to know if that setting is definitely the culprit. If the motherboard doesn't support it, I guess I'll just have to stick with IDE/PATA drives.

I'll be honest, I don't have a ton of experience tinkering with machines this old 😁—but as a starting point, why don't you run CrystalDiskInfo? If everything shows up blue, you're golden. If you see any yellow, there's some kind of issue brewing with the drive (it should tell you exactly what), and if it hits red... well, then it's definitely time for a replacement 😁

http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

Just click on the standard edition (the exe version)

Raymond Moore2 said:I want to know if that setting is definitely the culprit. If the motherboard doesn't support it, then I guess I'm stuck using IDE/PATA drives.

Not necessarily. You can just grab a PCI card controller to hook up SATA devices directly to the card instead.
http://www.newegg.com/p/sata-controller-card

But you're basically bypassing the onboard SATA ports; they become useless in that setup...

If a board has both SATA and PATA slots, it’s going to have a mode switch in the BIOS. It's standard.

At least my board has it, even with both types of slots available.

Here’s the issue. It's yellow.
Disk Error Log
Disk Error Log
Disk Error Log

The rest is blue.

Would you mind grabbing a Print Screen for me?

That was my original plan, but it looks like the attachment limit is stuck at 9.8 KB, and I just can't shrink the image any further. I guess I'm out of ideas here. 🙂

What are you talking to me about? Well, for example, if you open an image and hit Print Screen on your keyboard, you’ve basically captured your screen—then you just open Paint, hit Ctrl+V to paste it, and save it. Another way to do it is to just find the Snipping Tool in Windows; you can crop exactly what you need there and save it to your computer. Once you've done either of those steps, just head over to Imgur to upload the file, then grab the link and drop it here on the forum, and you're all set.

It’s looking pretty likely—honestly, I'm almost certain—that your hard drive is the culprit here. It probably has some bad sectors, especially since it shows about 25,000 hours of runtime 😁At the end of the day, just picking up a new drive should solve this once and for all.

Thanks!

I’m giving up on fixing this issue. I actually tried installing a second, functional SSD, but the screen freezing just kept happening. I ended up switching back to the old drive. Thanks to everyone for the help.

Just head into your BIOS—hit Main, then go to Configuration, and set SATA mode to AHCI (check page 72 of the manual)

To be honest, I'm a bit lost on your OS setup. Are you running a separate OS on every single drive and swapping them out, or are you just doing a full reinstall every time?

Take a look at this too:

http://www.askvg.com/how-to-change-s...lling-windows/

I checked the manual, but I don't see an option to configure the SATA as AHCI. I guess maybe each drive just has its own OS.