Strange issue

[Atomic_Sheep]

Hi, I'mhaving some rather peculiar computer problems. I started up starcraft 2 and it died on me - nothing out of the ordinary, I've had this issue before. However, today, something new happened. It didn't just crash on me, but it also BSOD on me. After the BSOD, I went back into Starcraft 2 to try to see how bad the error was and this time, the whole computer froze upon entering the main menu (this has not happened before) and then it BSOD. It froze in a strange manner, it started to freeze bit by bit, first the sound froze and the mouse was movable, then the mouse froze and the display went all wierd and after that froze for good. I tried ctrl alt del it but it BSOD at that point.

Here is where it gets even more wierd:

I have 4 Hdds and 2 RAID 0 partitions. This all happened in my second installation of windows. So I rebooted and went into my main installation of windows because I decided to finally reinstall the whole computer and install windows and linux. So I went into my main Windows partition and BSOD a short time after I started copying some files to my backup external. This BSOD felt very similar to the one I had just experienced when getting into starcraft ON A DIFFERENT PARTITION!

Coincidence? Well, I thought so, so I then deleted all partitions and created 3 new ones, one for linux and 2 for windows. I tried to install linux first and during the installation process, an error popped up suggesting some files were corrupt and the isntallation would not proceed. The probably causes, damaged disc (unlikely as it's brand spanking new disc with no scratches on it), or optical drive failure (haven't confirmed this yet, will do so soon but I don't think this is the issue either).

Anyway, so after unsuccessfully trying to install Linux, I decided, ok I'll go install Windows on my main partition. I go into the installer, click install, then an error pops up "verify that the installation sources are accessible and restart the installation".

These two installs were in RAID configurations on seperate drives. So I have no idea what is going on, does this sound like a hard drive problem? If so, how can it have spread from one partition to another?

If it doesn't sound like a hard drive problem, what else could it be?

EDIT: The error that popped up when I was installing Linux was an input/output error which the dialogue box suggested may be due to a faulty disc or dvd drive or hard drive.

I tried installing it again using my Blue Ray drive (not my DVD drive which I used during the first install attempty) and the same error popped up at the same spot, so maybe it is a DVD fault but I'm not sure, as I said, it's a brand new DVD disc. What are the chances that the same error pops up in the same spot if it's a hard drive fault?

 

[aphellyon]

I had the exact same issue with scii a while back. Doing the scii repair, trying to re-install/uninstall, or trying to restore win7 all would lead to BSOD. After a while, I started getting RAID warnings when rebooting after a crash. Pretty soon after that, one of my raptors started getting dropped from the array. After rebuilding the array in the intel matrix storage manager a few times, I figured the drive was about to fail and that maybe it was time for me to move to SSDs. Interestingly enough, while waiting for my ssds to ship, I identified the corrupted scii file that was causing the freeze up/bsod. I couldn't delete or rename it without causing a system freeze, so I renamed the root folder and did the scii repair.exe. Haven't had any problems since. I still haven't torn down the raptor array to test the drives, so I'm not sure if it was the drive failing or not... maybe it was some kind of raid controller issue?

 

[Atomic_Sheep]

the ICH10 or whatever it is RAID controller is supposedly pretty crap. I was trying to set up RAID 10 but that basically was dropping a drive on every boot and I was forced to do 8-12 hour rebuilds with each boot for about a week until a catastrophic fail happened. After that, I found out that to solve the issue, you had to update the RAID controller but for that, the way I understand it, you need to go to some hardware tech guys and have them reprogram the chip. The way I understood it, it wasn't something you could do with the tools available to a basic user.

The newer RAID controller supposedly was rock solid for RAID 10 whilst the one I have on my motherboard (I think as I said it's ICH10) but anyway, basically, it's useless and it showed. It's supposedly good enough for RAID 1 and 0 however and I had it running RAID 0 for about 6 months with crashes and restarts and reboots without any issues so it was good enough for that purpose. However I even though it was good enough, I still have the feeling that under certain circumstances it will die, maybe that's what we're experiencing with SCII but I don't know.

 

[Psycogeec]

If it doesn't sound like a hard drive problem, what else could it be?

?

Can also be caused by the Ram memory on the motherboard.
improper timing for the speed it is running, improper voltage for the speed it is running, incompatable memory. those kindsa things.

Could also be caused when overclocking and the chipset or PCI buss is not set correct which is usually off from defaults.

the rest has already been covered.

you know at first when i read your post, i think gee sounds like a video card issue , cause that can happen on hard overclocks or bad cooling, but then you descibe totally different situations, so dont discount 2 different things happening, or something causing 2 things to be incorrect. or on the edge of failing, and just pushed over when it has to do the real work things.