BIOS hangs and other strange issues after upgrade!

[brettjameslive]

Hi guys and gals,

So I picked up a machine from a good customer. The guy he used to get to to sort his computer, 18 months ago, 'upgraded' his tower (I have now 'inherited' his handiwork'. Now this customer is a professional 'Photoshopper' and photographer, so I guess he has pretty unique needs...

He has a number of SATA drives, some Sata II, some III, a socket 1150 MB with an i7 2nd Gen, and 8GB of RAM, running Win 7 HP 64 bit. He also has various external devices, HDD's, eSata, Wacom tablet etc pugged in.

While the machine, on the whole, works fine, he has a number of niggling issues, and as a perfectionist, he wants these gone. I have some ideas, but not a lot of answers... yet.

So, 2 out of 5 times, when booting the machine, it will hang at the BIOS, and take maybe 2 or 3 minutes, sometimes, he tells me, longer to 'beep' and then begin to boot. I suspected external devices, so unplugged all but keyboard and mouse, and the issue persisted.

Also...

When the machine has booted, and he is accessing an internal SATA that is non primary, he clicks on a folder, and waits for an age for the machine to run it's little green bar at the top, to index the drive. This happens every time, and he's very frustrated. Especially as most of his photos are on the other drives. I think there is a RAID 0 set as the primary disk, on which, he also has a scratch disk. Would you have a scratch disk on the same volume as the primary drive? I thought not...

And finally, IN photoshop when he saves an image, or edits a layer, he has to wait quite some time for it to either save (little bar moves along steadily, but not as quickly as you'd expect), or for the effect to be applied (a few seconds). The reason he is mystified about this, is that on his second PC (a dual-core with 4GB RAM), none of these issues are present.

I thought that 18 months ago he should have had a 3rd gen i7, as opposed to a 2nd gen, as an upgrade, but regardless, the machine is displaying strange behaviour.

I am trying to push him toward a SSD as a primary drive, but he needs convincing.

Anyone have any ideas/suggestions on these issues please? If it helps, I could include a Speccy report as an attachment?

On a side note, I have been looking online for a good resource for the ultimate things that a PC build requires specifically for a photographer. These's lots out there, and lots that I can assume, but nothing I could find that was really by the experts, for the experts, if you know what I mean. Apparently a real bugbear of these guys is people trying to sell them gaming rigs....

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[NYJimbo]

So other than disconnecting some external things you did no other diagnostics ?

 

[brettjameslive]

So other than disconnecting some external things you did no other diagnostics ?

Diagnostics in terms on hardware tests all come back fine. I think there is a bottleneck with the various older HDD's but I haven't been able to identify any HW issues...

RAM ok
HDD's ok.

I used UBCD utils....

 

[BrentfromZulu]

Just to clarify, if it is a socket 1150 motherboard, then it is a 4th Gen i7 (Haswell). It is not compatible with the prior generation. Are you sure it isn't a socket 1155? That supports the 2nd and 3rd gen.

Is it a custom build? If so did you build it, or someone else?

It seems like a slow HDD if the green bar is taking forever. Crystaldiskinfo will give some details.

 

[nixmix]

Try and optimise the folder for general items

thewindowsclub.com/optimize-make-windows-7-folders-display-contents-faster

 

[brettjameslive]

Sorry, my bad, yes it is a socket 1155 mobo. It's a custom build built by some guy who is no longer around, I have only jst got my hands on it.

Thanks for the link ref Crystaldiskinfo, it's told me that there is a faulty disk, which I am going to replace. This disk, however isn't the one that seems to 'lag'.

There are 5 physical disks in the machine.

Disk array is set up as:

3GB x 2 SATA WDC RED (RAID Mirror 1) 3.5" HDD NAS drives with 64MB Cache (Mirror - 'M' Drive) - Should you use NAS drives in a PC as a mirror??

750GB Seagate Momentus 7500RPM 2.5" HDD (C Drive)

1GB WDC - Blue 32MB Cache - Old Windows Installation 'E' Drive (backup?) on 50% and 50% set up as a scratch disk ('S' Drive)

2GB WDC - Green 32MB Cache (F Drive) - failing.

The mirror lags, as does the Old windows disk.

Should the scratch disk really be on this 'old' disk?

I am about to install 32GB of 1866MHz RAM, so the only other thing I can optimise are the drives...?

Thanks for the link to the optimise folder.... will let you know how it goes...

 

[phaZed]

Sounds like a bad drive to me. That would explain the long BIOS boot time as well as Windows presenting the files. Just because it isn't the "lag drive" doesn't mean that it isn't causing issues on the SATA bus for everything else.

 

[brettjameslive]

Yeah, thanks Aaron.

I'll replace the failing drive, and we'll see if that affects the issue.

Customer also wants to replace the mirror to add more room, so it'll be quite a bit of work I guess....

Will keep this thread posted as to the results. Thanks again all.

 

[FremontPC]

Watch out for issues with early cougar point chipsets on mobo's with both Sata III and Sata II ports.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Maybe get rid of the mirror, drop the ssd in as you suggested, make sure to create a clone of it in case of future troubles.

Maybe tell him get rid of all the extra drives, maybe put him on something like a 2-3tb and transfer all the data. I tell you I like these little buffalo drives like these

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/desktop-hard-drives/drivestation/drivestation-duo-1

We use a couple of 6TB ones for backups, but we have the 2 drives in each one in a mirrored RAID, one drops out, should still have data, has a utility that you instal and you can use it to configure and monitor the RAID. Think that might be a way for him to do this, and if he needs some extra internal storage, maybe a 1-2TB internal drive to work from. I can actually get 1TB toshiba drives from a microcenter near me for around 50 bucks new, so they aren't overly expensive.

 

[brettjameslive]

Thanks, I think I'll go speak to him about that.

I too like the buffalo drives. I still have one running as a media player on my network that has barely been switched off in 6 years.... (hears a clicking sound)....