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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

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  • Did you try plugging the SSD to another port? I'd say it's more controller related than SSD related. IF controller is sharing resources with say network card under certain conditions, you might be having trouble. Also try moving network card to another slot, it may help.
    – AndrejaKo
    Sep 20, 2011 at 9:34
  • No, I haven't tried different ports. HDD1 and 2 are on SATA ports 1,3 and SSD is on SATA port 6. Will I get problems booting windows if I switch SSD to another port?
    – Fuu
    Sep 20, 2011 at 9:42
  • You may have to set the SSD as the boot device again in BIOS, but otherwise, it should be fine. I never had problems switching ports in the past.
    – AndrejaKo
    Sep 20, 2011 at 9:51

1 Answer 1

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It's a bug in the chipset (SATA related) that causes these failures with SSDs. For some mainboards bugfixes have been released, but I got bored of waiting for ASUS to provide one for my Mainboard and simply removed the SSD, running on HDDs only again.

A friend of mine, running the same ASUS mainboard and facing the same problems just installed a 3rd party SATA card and all SSD-issues disappeared.

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