Solve your computer problem with the help of experts!

[Kev]

At a guess Omkar I'd say your Hard drive is about to fail. Had a similar thing happen to me a couple of years ago.

 

[omkarjere]

At a guess Omkar I'd say your Hard drive is about to fail. Had a similar thing happen to me a couple of years ago.

Its a new Seagate 160GB SATA. So if it fails will I get new one for FREE as I am in warranty period ? One more thing If I format my PC now it will work fine 10-15 days and after that problems will start why like this ?

 

[Kev]

Not sure, but its what happened to me, the PC was taking longer and longer to startup, then I noticed things like it struggling to play music so eventually I re-formatted. Everything seemed ok for a bit (couple of weeks I guess) then same story, then the hard drive started to fail and it took me hours and hours to transfer it to another drive.

 

[Kshitiz_Indian]

I'm smelling the disabling of DMA in your case. Had that with me and really unpleasant, makes using a computer pathetic!

To check for it, go to My computer, properties, hardware, device manager.

Now there'll be a drop down called IDE ATA / SATA controllers or something like that. Open it.

There will be a bunch of IDE channels like things there. Open each of them (Going to their properties i.e) and go the advanced settings tab. In two of them, there should be a list of devices, and one of them will have your Hard Disk. See what mode is it operating on.

 

[omkarjere]

Ok I checked my Primary and Secondary devices

Here is my main device manager:

I checked both the Primary and Secondary IDE's it says something "DMA if available" and other option is PIO (or something like that)

A screenshot from Primary IDE Channel(2):

 

[Kshitiz_Indian]

Do one thing, uninstall all the IDE channels and IDE controllers. And restart the PC and let them reinstall.

 

[omkarjere]

Do one thing, uninstall all the IDE channels and IDE controllers. And restart the PC and let them reinstall.

Suddenly my PC is working gr8 dunno how. Can a faulty SATA power cable be the cause for this ?

 

[Kshitiz_Indian]

Has it happened after you did what I said?

 

[siddharth2002]

Not sure, but its what happened to me, the PC was taking longer and longer to startup, then I noticed things like it struggling to play music so eventually I re-formatted. Everything seemed ok for a bit (couple of weeks I guess) then same story, then the hard drive started to fail and it took me hours and hours to transfer it to another drive.

It's the PIO mode which operates at slightly reduced speed. It usually means that the hard-drive is not in mint condition, about to die or being used a lot. Happened to me recently and I changed the mode again to DMA from Device Manager- IDE channel properties and seems to be fine since.

 

[omkarjere]

Has it happened after you did what I said?

No actually I removed the power SATA cable and plugged it back now its working gr8. Could this be a PSU problem ? BTW can anyone tell me what is RAM Latency ?

 

[MacWorld]

This should help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_latency

Good liuck reading all that

MacWorld added 59 Minutes and 24 Seconds later...

Guys i have a problem on my laptop. where every once in a while the brightness on my screen will just go. the screen goes really dark. I can just about see whats on the screen. only just.

I can only get it back to normal by restarting. My laptop is running of AC power, there is no battery and the charger is faulty, this seems to accur when i move the laptop, could this be because power is lost but comes back again when i move the laptop.

Thanks in advance

 

[Kshitiz_Indian]

Yeah basically to reiterate what Sid said your Hard Disk could've switched to PIO mode due to either some unstable power, or sometimes it does when there are certain bad sectors and when an HDD retries to read them, it tries it generally 6 times. If its still not able to read /transfer something properly after 6 times it switches to the PIO mode which is much slower.

The reason I asked you to unisntall and reinstall was that sometimes when it switches to PIO, doing the above brings it back to DMA.

Kshitiz_Indian added 54 Minutes and 9 Seconds later...

Well you have a Mac so there goes half my brain. It could be due to loose connection inside your laptop or some problem with your display driver.

 

[MacWorld]

no its not a mac, i have a imac, a desktop pc and a laptop. 3 in all. its toshiba runs xp. I can assure you its not the display driver, i recently reformatted (yesterday) and installed new drivers.

Im guessing its loose connections as half of my laptop has already come apart. not even worth £10 now.

 

[Kev]

Sounds like the backlight is switching off, it it happens when you move it then I'd guess, yes it's a loose wire.

It's the PIO mode which operates at slightly reduced speed. It usually means that the hard-drive is not in mint condition, about to die or being used a lot. Happened to me recently and I changed the mode again to DMA from Device Manager- IDE channel properties and seems to be fine since.

Yeah I tried things like that too, and it had a short term fix, but at the end of the day, if it's going to fail, it's going to fail. For the price of hard-drives I'd rather change it and be happy that one day I'm not gonna turn the thing on and its buggered for good. I hate re-installing, you always forget to back something up, or can't find a disk you need. Easier to sort it before it's too late.

 

[Kshitiz_Indian]

You're right about that Kev.

But in some cases when it switches to PIO mode just because of some CPU malfunction / motherboard malfunction(Which it switches because it isn't able to transfer in the high speed DMA mode) then it gets a bit too, you know, ignorant to change the HDD.