Computer troubles

It appears that my computer troubles may finally be over... for now.

I'll do my best to briefly explain it, considering most of you don't want the details, and those who do will criticize me the more details I give!

It all started last summer. I moved from Utah to Washington. Along with other belongings, I brought my computer with me. Within a couple weeks of setting it up, the system would no longer boot. After running Seagate's SeaTools diagnostics, it told me that one of my three hard drives was bad. I figured the jostling involved with the move could have caused a hard drive failure. I initiated the RMA process, and some $20 and 3 days later, I had a new hard drive. All was good again in the world, or so I thought.

Several months later I attempted to install Windows Vista on one of my hard drives. Immediately I began to have problems with the system locking up for a few seconds, and then it would respond again. I turned to the Event Viewer (Start | Run | eventvwr) for answers. The System log was filled with events such as the following:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: atapi
Event Category: None
Event ID: 9
Description:
The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort2, did not respond within the timeout period.

There were varying errors (I believe there was also error ID 11, but 9 was more frequent), but all were disk related. Doing some searching for others with this problem led me to believe that Vista and my on-board RAID controller were not compatible. After trying a few workarounds, I decided I would remove the RAID setup and just have 3 independent hard disks.

I reinstalled the operating system, and by this point I knew that I could diagnose the problem by the sounds the hard disk would make. The hard drive audibly made a clicking sound, spooled down, and spooled back up. At this point I was beginning to wonder if it was some other driver that was not compatible with Windows Vista, or if it was possibly a failing SATA controller or cable.

I reinstalled Windows XP and forgot about Vista and my troubles seemed to disappear for a time. Soon though, the hard drive sound returned, and once it did, all sound was messed up. Windows startup and exit sounds were incredibly garbled. Even music played through Windows Media Player or iTunes would be distorted. I had all sorts of theories about how the sound driver could be corrupted by the hard disk problems, but the fact was I didn't know how to fix it. I would reinstall XP, but the problem would keep resurfacing.

I searched and searched on the Internet under different forums for people having similar problems. SeaTools was showing that one hard drive was failing the diagnostics now. Another failed hard drive in a year? One person had suggested that it might be the power supply, which for some reason, I had ignored until now. I decided that this may fit the symptoms, seeing as how the third hard drive had been added last year, and Windows Vista could have demanded slightly higher power output from the power supply. I postulated that this increased demand could have led to a degrading power supply that would now not even support Windows XP with 2 hard drives.

Whether or not any of my assumptions were right, I replaced the 2-year-old 420W power supply with a new 550W power supply. It's been several weeks now, and I'm glad to report that there have not been any disk errors! Maybe one of these days I will get around to installing Vista again on one of the drives, or configuring the on-board RAID again, but for now I'm just happy that I can go several weeks without reinstalling the operating system, hearing the hard drive restart, or hearing garbled sound in Windows XP!

So if you've had any of these symptoms, don't forget to consider the power supply, especially if your power load has recently increased!

P.S. For those interested, here are my system specifications:
ASUS P5GD1 motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 630 3.0 GHz dual core LGA775 2M
Kingston 1 GB (2x512 MB) DDR RAM
3x300 GB HDD (Maxtor/Seagate)
PowerColor Radeon X800GTO 256 MB
550W (now) power supply