IDE failure

I've recently build a new PC and since the build it's largely been fine albeit with a few crashes.

The first and longest running problem is just a crash on the Windows boot screen, the system reboots and either says it was shutdown incorrectly, offering safe boot options or a system startup diagnostic. Going through the crashdumps it seems to point at the atikmdag driver for my Radeon 4870 and after searching google for similar problems it seems to be a largely widespread problem with a variety of causes. Nonetheless I was planning to return it in the coming days and get a new one incase it was a hardware fault.

However today I've had a series of crashes where by the applications currently being used become unresponsive followed 10 seconds or so later by the whole system freezing. Event manager puts this down to atapi with the following report

I'm not sure whether the two problems are related but this new one is certainly more severe and I'm not sure which device is IDE port 2 and hence causing the problem.

Thanks for any help

 

Well first thing I'd think is its either the IDE port 2 or a Device connected to IDE port 2 ... what devices do you have connected to IDE ports??

 

I've got a DVD burner and hard drive on SATA, nothing on IDE (I only have 1 port anyway).

Since I've posted it's been an effort to reboot the PC, together with the original problems it's also shown a disc read error message on startup 3 or 4 times. I've tried Samsung's diagnostic tool for the hard drive but it won't even install on boot, just comes up with an out of memory error

 

Hmmm ... well there's where I'd go into process of elimination troubleshooting mode and remove all HW (including front USB ports audio ports etc, Optical drives, secondary HDD, everything except a SINGLE RAM stick, CPU, CPU FAN, primary HDD. Obviously revert to onboard graphics if possible and remove and other cards that are unnecessary. Then begin testing. If you don't get the issue, begin to replace things one by one till you get the issue again.

 

Run Check Disk

 

chkdsk found some errors and cleaned them up, it seems ok now but then again it does go through spells of booting fine so I'll let it run for a few days and take it apart piece by piece if not

 

I think it was a dodgy SATA connector on the motherboard, I've changed it around now and it's started up 15 times or so without fault

Thanks

 

Sounds good ... glad to hear you got it worked out.