HP Pavillion disk read failure

I forgot to add, this is a model a6720y desktop Pavillion. It has an AMD x4 @2.2GHz, 6Gb of memory, and no IDE drives.

you got burned, what Can I say!

My son had a PC that went south when a high performance video card was installed over the cheaper one that he had in the PC. It worked and all how ever, the PC would some times Reset, black out etc.. to the point where it wouldn't reboot if you didn't let it rest. It turns out that a support chip on the MB was running very hot with this card in it.. Remove the card, and it was fine.. There were no options on the card to config for this problem. Guess the buss speed the card was attempting to operate at was killing the chip!

Oh well.

Sell it.

Not really, the computer cost $7. I got 6Gb of DDR2 memory, a sata DVD writer, case and 300w power supply.

root Inscribed thus:

Check for "Bad Caps" around the chip. Not just high ESR, low or non existent capacitance. Though I must admit I've seen a few with holes blown through the encapsulation.

Let me guess(tm). SATA2 drive?

Look into the BIOS CMOS setup and see if it has any setting for the SATA drive that look like "ATA compatibility mode". If so turn it on. I'm finding that some drives need this setting, while others work without it. Same problem on Dell desktops. No experience with the a6720y so I can't offer my usual proclamation that everything that HP made in the last 5 years is junk. The lack of replacement boards on eBay is a good sign. Usually, when there are a mess of defective motherboards, the dead ones appear on eBay in an effort to recover some of the expense of replacement.

Also, move the original drive over to another machine and try the hard disk drive. Internal is best as you can use S.M.A.R.T. to determine if it's dead or about to die. You'll need the OS recovery partition from the drive in order to install on a new drive, or just order the recovery DVD's.

Also, make sure you have the SATA data cable shoved into SATA port 0, that you have that SATA ID enabled in the BIOS CMOS setup, and that you have it set to boot from that ID.

Any time you see wonky behavior from a PC, check for bad caps. Around the processor is a prime area of concern (ripple currents can be tens of amps, easily, so ESR becomes a big issue).

You can also check *inside* the power supply for similar problems.

I started a list of (cap and PC) manufacturers that I have encountered this problem and gave up as it became too long to track effectively (some I just recognize instinctively, now).

Note what the machine is doing at the time (idle vs. working hard, etc.).

Cold spray (whatever form of politically/legally correct "freon" is en vogue) can help if you suspect a solid state device.

The components with heat sinks are probably *expected* to run warm -- don't be surprised if they *do*! :>

Does a quick cycling of power (completely removed before being restored) give you another "3 hours" of use? Or, does the problem come back "quickly" (i.e., if it is thermal, it should come back quickly; if it is a software problem, it could take 3 more hours for a memory leak, etc. to manifest)

Yes, the drive I used is a Seagate 1Tb Barracuda. I pulled it from a working system, the drive is known to be good.

I have a choice of IDE mode, RAID, or AHCI. I have tried both RAID and AHCI, with no difference in the time before the read errors begin. Remember, the damn system will run for several hours with intense disk activity, then I'll start getting i/o device errors and the disk is unreadable.

I just switched the mode to IDE. The up-time was less than an hour. I think it is time to salvage what I can from the machine.

Agreed on caps as I replace lots of them. Thing is, bad caps usually work better (less bad) when warmed up. I just tossed the Samsung DLP set because of a thermal problem. Nearly all the caps were new and the few that remained tested good. It too would run several hours before quitting.

G=B2

Note that I asked for an assessment of what the circumstances leading up to -- and subsequent to -- the crash. I.e., it may not be "heat" but, rather, *what* the machine was doing (and had

I've had machines that wouldn't handle a "fresh install" but would run fine if you installed a prebuilt disk in them. Other machines ran fine until *lots* of memory was needed. etc.

Blindly chasing heat (or caps or ... ) without a handle on a *reproducible* crash scenario is just futility...

No, quick power cycle gives nothing. The system won't boot up at all. After a few minutes of OFF, the system will run a few minutes. The first failure followed a fresh install. I took a nap and came back after a couple of hours and the system wouldn't read the disk. Subsequent failures happened during attempts to copy several tens of Gb of files from a backup disk to the fresh install. After a couple of hours (or more) the copies would result in i/o error and then the system was dead.

I hope I have answered your question.

The machine is only one year old. All the caps look brand new, not a bulge among them. I've run into a failure of a bridge chip before with almost identical symptoms, although the older bridge chip shut down much faster than this one. In the case of the older bridge chip, the heat sink was held in place by double sided sticky tape. After a while the tape degraded and the heat sink wasn't firmly attached to the chip.

A lot of things can cause problems, starting with a marginal power supply.

I have two Intel boards with failed IDE. Both SATA and PATA ports out. It's not an uncommon problem. Buy a PCI card SATA controller and your troubles are over.

Do you have more details on specifically what sort of I/O error is being reported? This might help pinpoint just what's going wrong.

On some systems (e.g. Linux) the kernel logs would prove helpful... the disk driver will log the actual values of the disk's status register, as well as status from the motherboard's disk controller.

This information could help distinguish actual on-the-disk faults (which from your previous posts seem like they aren't the issue), from unexpected disk resets (which could indicate power supply problems), from DMA CRC errors (which would indicate communication problems over the cable, or faults in the onboard disk controller), from timeouts and host-initiated resets (which once again could point to host-side problems).

Another suggestion: make yourself a boot disk with a copy of MEMTEST86+, boot it up, and let it run overnight. A lot of weird system misbehavior can be caused by sporadic DRAM problems.

How do you know that one or more of the things you mention are not the cause of the problem?

Well, I have been using 4Gb of the memory in my wife's machine for several days now, and the Sata dvd drive in my machine. The power supply was swapped out without success so I can count on that being good, even though it is only 300W, pretty small for today.

I screwed around with the machine for a day and a half and finally decided to harvest the parts. The case isn't worth much since the control cables are special to the motherboard.

When the machine was running the data transfer rate was way slower than my Core 2 machine using the same type of sata drive. Overall bad design I think.

Or just not working correctly..