Intermittently Not Booting and Games Locking Up

[SS_Dave]

A while ago I had a version 1.0 box fail to boot intermittently and every time I moved the hard disk it would come good.

The drive is a WD 500 gig Pata/Ide drive.

I closed the power connectors in the molex plug and swapped the 40 way cable still the same. As I had nothing to lose I removed the PCB thinking it had dry solder joints on the power and 40 way connectors but I noticed the contacts for the heads and spindle motor are tarnished. A quick clean of the PCB and spring contacts with iso-propyol alcohol and reassemble and it has not missed a beat since (3 weeks and still going and before it was every 2nd day)

I now have a Seagate 1tb from a desk computer with the same symptoms and after removing the PCB it looks the same. This drive is 2 years old and has had a max of 1.8tb data transferred to and from it so bugger all. and 1/3 for that was rescuing the data from it

  

 

Something to keep in mind for intermittent drive problems.

 

SS Dave

 

 

Those that can hard-mod, Those that can’t soft-mod.