I've been experiencing strange issue, where the computer abruptly crashes. Perhaps someone out there can shed light into what could be the cause of this?
OS in question is Windows 7.
The peculiar thing about this is that once the machine has crashed and tries to reboot itself, it hangs up in bios when detecting the 3rd SATA device, which in this case is a OCZ Vertex 3 128Mb SSD disk. The first two HDDs are detected fine. It will sit there indefinitely, and will get stuck again if I do a soft reboot from keyboard. Turning off the power for a second, and the machine jumps to life and happily boots up to windows.
Now the second part of this peculiar issue is that the crashes only happen when I'm running ICS through the second NIC on the PCI socket (Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC) to another PC. This has happened with two different PCs that are not alike, one running Fedora and one Windows 7. Primary NIC on the motherboard is Realtek RTL8168C(P)/8111C(P).
So I did the obvious thing and updated the SSD firmware to latest version. I unplugged the other computer and removed ICS for unrelated reasons, PC would not crash for weeks. I didn't initially realize this stopped the crashing and I was pleased that the PC would not crash anymore after updating the SSD firmware. Now that I added another machine the crashes started again. NIC drivers are at latest versions.
I'm not sure how this is even possible, maybe I'm missing something or am I just misintepreting these crashes and finding causality where there is none? What else could be causing these crashes? Unfixed bug in the SSD firmware? Bad secondary NIC?
For info: Intel Q9550 CPU, no overclocking. Asus P5Q SE2 MB 6Gb RAM Radeon 4890 OCZ Vertex 3 128Mb SSD 2 other SATA HDDs Realtek RTL8139 NIC