Could HD cause instability?

[FishD]

Having instability but cant track it down.

One comment suggested because my HD is an old one, it might be the cause. However on sytem check, it checks out fine, also defrags good. Dont wanna have to change it since its got a lot of things on it.

Im getting the blue stop screen intermittantly. Have tried new ram. No effect. Also seems to go for a period reasonably stable, then goes through an unstable period. Have monitoried room and fan exit temperature, but there's no co-relation


Any comments most welcome

[turd]

Sometimes i have encountered what I thought to be a drive related error and it would turn out to be the PSU. dont much about that one in your sig but it seems like it could do the job power wise, but could be flakey. Also sometimes just a bad IDE cable can do some strange stuff to the drives, some rounded cables can also get some cross talk going which can cause some intermitent errors. But its really hard to say. Stop errors usually mean hardware related. I often get them as a quick indicator of a too high OC, so are you up on the FSB?

You could always pull that extra drive and see if the error goes away.

[FishD]

Many thanks for the advice Turd

You are not the first one to mention the PSU as a possible casue. I did some checking and posted some details

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=285223

However got no advice on what is good and what is not good PSU voltage stability!

Since then I have got some PC3200 memory, and am still experiencing the problem. So i guess that the memory is out of the eqation.

Yes i'm running the FSB @ 119x4, instead of 100x4. But Until recently this setting was perfectly stable. Only thing different now is WindowsXP. But don't think the OS is the problem.

I'll do some swapping out of HD (cant remove my system drive) and comparing cables as you indicated.

The PSU is only a year old, and would gladly replace it with an Antec, but I've gotta be pretty certain that its the source of my problem. And with no one telling me what are the symptoms of a bad PSU, I continue to have hte dilema, and the problem.


Regards,

[shadowdr]

Go into device manager /advanced/startup and recovery and untick the automatic reboot on error.Write down the bsod errors,and search the microsoft knowledge base for them.They should also be in the computer management console in the event viewer.This might save some time.