Another obscure question for everyone.
Over this weekend my computer failed to boot into windows from a cold boot. Booted the machine into Ubuntu via a live CD and noticed one of my hard drives had seemingly wiped itself (ran diagnostics on the disc and there was still data, so I think it dropped the partition table or something weird). Didn't think anything of it, and tried to re-install windows (Win7 RC) on it later that evening. Fortunately I had a week old backup on an external drive and had plenty of space to manually backup all the important data.
Tonight I was re-installing some applications I had lost during the and the same thing happened. I cursed the machine and figured maybe there's some weird setting or something that I accidentally carried over when restoring the manual backup. Re-install windows again and go do something else for 20 minutes. Come back, logged in and let windows do the updates routine. Machine reboots and fails to come back up. Go into my raid controller via the BIOS drop the RAID and recreate the RAID set. Everything is fine.
Except, at this point I can't trust the system to stay up and running. System has been stable as a rock for the entire lifetime to this point. I gave the motherboard a visual inspection when it went down over the weekend thinking maybe some capacitors blew as the system is 4 years 2 months old at this point, but I didn't find any evidence of a blown capacitor. However, I did notice that the Southbridge heatsink/fan is sticking and making noise.
As this weekend was one of the hotter weekends of late (it's been abnormally cool for New England), is it possible that the Southbridge is overheating and causing issues with the onboard RAID? It should also be noted that the RAID discs are Seagate 7200.11 drives which have the latest firmware (that I know of) on them. Motherboard is an Epox 9NPA+SLi board with a Silicon Image 3132 controller.
If it is the Southbridge, what's the best way to fix the fan so it doesn't stick, or should I just grab an aftermarket heatsink/fan? I'd like to keep this system working for another 2 months which is when I plan to upgrade. Preferably I'd like to have it last longer so that I can pass the system along to someone in my family.
Over this weekend my computer failed to boot into windows from a cold boot. Booted the machine into Ubuntu via a live CD and noticed one of my hard drives had seemingly wiped itself (ran diagnostics on the disc and there was still data, so I think it dropped the partition table or something weird). Didn't think anything of it, and tried to re-install windows (Win7 RC) on it later that evening. Fortunately I had a week old backup on an external drive and had plenty of space to manually backup all the important data.
Tonight I was re-installing some applications I had lost during the and the same thing happened. I cursed the machine and figured maybe there's some weird setting or something that I accidentally carried over when restoring the manual backup. Re-install windows again and go do something else for 20 minutes. Come back, logged in and let windows do the updates routine. Machine reboots and fails to come back up. Go into my raid controller via the BIOS drop the RAID and recreate the RAID set. Everything is fine.
Except, at this point I can't trust the system to stay up and running. System has been stable as a rock for the entire lifetime to this point. I gave the motherboard a visual inspection when it went down over the weekend thinking maybe some capacitors blew as the system is 4 years 2 months old at this point, but I didn't find any evidence of a blown capacitor. However, I did notice that the Southbridge heatsink/fan is sticking and making noise.
As this weekend was one of the hotter weekends of late (it's been abnormally cool for New England), is it possible that the Southbridge is overheating and causing issues with the onboard RAID? It should also be noted that the RAID discs are Seagate 7200.11 drives which have the latest firmware (that I know of) on them. Motherboard is an Epox 9NPA+SLi board with a Silicon Image 3132 controller.
If it is the Southbridge, what's the best way to fix the fan so it doesn't stick, or should I just grab an aftermarket heatsink/fan? I'd like to keep this system working for another 2 months which is when I plan to upgrade. Preferably I'd like to have it last longer so that I can pass the system along to someone in my family.
