SATA HDD Question

[giovanni]

Hello,

Both my hard disks worked very well until recently, but the problem is that during the past few weeks, sometimes both my hard disks are detected by the BIOS, sometimes not. I ran the seatools test on DOS on both hard disks and it ran fine on both of them, although the program froze one time during the test on one of the hard disks. Sometimes when I am in windows xp the mouse sttuters and sometimes appears a blue screen, I uninstalled the chipset drivers and have the same problem. Yesterday windows xp gave me the error that ntdrl is missing and I had to restore the computer with an image I made with maxblast. Do you think maybe my motherboard is at fault or could be a bad SATA cable?

Any help appreciated.

[minsonngo]

What are your system specs? Brand and model of each component please.

[Cricket]

Do you think maybe my motherboard is at fault or could be a bad SATA cable?I'd try another SATA cable first.

You might also want to check that the power cables to the hard drives are secure.

:) Cricket

[minsonngo]

It would be a rare occurance if both SATA cables are bad! :D

[giovanni]

Thanks for the replies. I replaced both SATA cables and everything is running fine for two days now. The ones I had the connection on both sides was pretty loose, that could be the problem I had.

For a while I noticed that my 3.3v rail is running kind of low, I want to know if is time to replace my power supply or what can I do to lower it. My system specs are:

A64 3000+ S754
ATI X850XT AGP
2 X 1024 CORSAIR XMS DDR RAM
2 X160 maxtor SATA HDD'S
Creative Sound Blaster X-fi music
Seagate 160 GB USB HDD
BenQ 16X DVDRW
Liteon 20X DVDRW
2 X 80mm case fan
1 120mm case fan

Antec True power 430 power supply specs:

+5v 36A
+12v 20A
+3.3v 28A
-5v 0.5A
-12v 1.0A
+5SB 2.0A

+5 +12 max load 410W

The readings for my computer voltage is:

Vcore 1.55v
+3.3v 3.07v
+5v 4.89v
+12v 11.80v
-12v -12.20v
-5v -5.15v
+5VSB 5.35v
VBAT 3.26v

Any help appreciated.

[minsonngo]

Wow... I never heard of loose SATA cables... thats a new one for my books! Glad you got it working though.

[giovanni]

In my computer case, the hard disk is mounted vertically instead of horizontally like in most cases and is put in a way that the side pannel is pressed against the SATA cables, but I placed them better this time and hopefullly I don't have the same problem again.

Thanks.