Chipset failure? - please help

[Markey]

Hi,

I've got an acer aspire revo PC, and it has developed a weird problem. When I boot the PC, it does not always detect the hard drive. Sometimes it says that there's no hard drive plugged in. In the cases where it does detect the hard drive, windows will start to boot, but it usually takes 10 or more minutes to get to the desktop. (I have an intel SSD, so it should boot really fast.) Once I get to the desktop, I randomly get stuttering where the computer locks up for 20+ seconds and then begins responding again. After a couple hours of running, it will just hang completely. I've run speedfan, and all the temperatures look fine. I pulled the SSD thinking that was the problem and put it in another PC and it's been working fine for the past couple weeks.

I'm thinking this is a chipset issue, but I'm not sure. The last thing I did with the PC before this problem started was to copy 2 terabytes from one external usb drive to another external usb drive. I have no idea why that would break the computer, but maybe it overheated or something? I was running all stock cooling fans (which I verified were still working after the problem showed up) and the PC was in a coolish room ~60F.

Any thoughts?

 

[Lanyap]

Since the SSD works in another PC I would replace the cable on the original and plug it into a different port.

 

[Markey]

I would do that on a normal PC, but this is one of those super tiny computers that doesn't have space for a cable. When you install the HD, you push it into a connector on the mobo and then secure it by screwing the HD down to the mobo. So, there really is no cable to fail, it's just a connector that's soldered onto the motherboard. I looked at it closely and it doesn't look like there are any broken solder joints on the connector. Also, this computer is a desktop, so it just sits there and never gets bumped around, so I doubt there's a mechanical failure.

A little more info on the PC:
1.6GHz atom 230
1GB ram
NVIDIA ION chipset
Windows XP

 

[Markey]

deleted

 

[mfenn]

It's certainly possible that the sata port is going bad (usually because of a hairline solder failure somewhere on the board). There's not much you can do about it in something as time as a Revo though.

 

[Markey]

I guess it's possible there's a connection failure, but the timing of it seems too coincidental that I had just transfered tons of data and then this shows up.

I had left the computer on for over a year before the problem showed up and it had 99.9% uptime and I had never seen any problems with it.

I'm more suspicious of some sort of silicon failure. Has anyone ever had a system fail from transferring large amounts of data nonstop?

 

[mfenn]

It is extremely unlikely that the chip itself is bad. Silicon chips are very robust.