BIOHD errors, freezing, puzzling

[palealien]

Old machine, XP, I know.

Started locking up intermittently, not a big deal. Found masive dirt on the processor heat sink, have seen this cause the problem and cleaned it, OK for awhile.

Then freeze became more frequent to the point of unuseability.

Booted to Safe Mode fine, ran anti-virus,  all the diags I could, everything and  scandisk checked fine. Tried defrag, hung halfway. Tried Sys Restore, hung halfway.

I keep all my data on a separate internal drive, but I have lots of legacy software I can ill afford to lose

Running the diag on boot I get BIOHD-1 on the boot drive and BIOHD-8 on the second, although both are working and accessible.

Still boots normally and has now been up for about an hour, a record. I have a feeling this has been happening for a long time, but I usually keep the machine on and only check diags at a time like this.

I keep two backup boot drives for just this reason, and have used successfully from time to time. Now neither will work. I suspect a motherboard issue, ot SATA cable problems? Just trying for a few new ideas here for a weird problem. Oh yeah, I I used to do this for a living bit quit cause I gfot tired of stuff like this. 🙂

[old_geekster]

@palealien, welcome to the forum.

The BIOHD-1 means there is no communications.  I suggest reseating the cable to the drive to see if that solves the problem.  The BIOHD-8 means that the hard drive is failing.  The only option here is to clone the drive to assure that you save your software and personal data.  There are many FREE cloning apps available.

Please click the Thumbs up + button if I have helped you and click Accept as Solution if your problem is solved.

[palealien]

Thanks, but as I mentioned I tried that. Reseated all the cables, etc. All I can try now is swapping them in case the order is messed up somehow, my last known good boot drive was not recognized.

The one thats giving the -8 error is a 3TB that I repartitioned to 2 for XP as an experiment, so that might explain why that occurred. I have clones of the drives so I am not worried. The boot drive is giving the -1 error, but it boots and read/writes fine for now. All it's doing is freezing after anywhere from 20 mintes to 8 hours. I was a PC tech and have only seen this once before, it turned out to be a motherboard issue. I have just never worked on or seen an HP error message- we were pretty much a Dell shop.

[old_geekster]

You are very welcome.  Thank you for the additional information, @palealien. 

I knew that you had reseated the cables, but thought that it would be worth another try.  Of course, this wouldn't do any good since it was a motherboard problem.  I am glad that you solved your own problem.

[palealien]

Well, actually just a guess, I should probably rearrange them too or maybe replace one by one.

Not really solved yet, just hoping it might be something about which I was unaware. Thanks for following my problem though. Probably won't make $$ sense to swap the board if that's the only answer. 

[old_geekster]

I would definite try swapping the drives.  It certainly won't hurt.  However, there can only be one OS on the computer or it may cause boot problems.  Also, you should be able to find the exact motherboard on ebay or other online website.

[palealien]

Job Great tip on the board, that will bey my next move. Hey, another thing I forgot to mention-there was a huge hairball under th processor fan, I have seen this cause lockups in the past, and cleaning usually got it going again- so independent of the HD error, is it possible the chip could have been heat stressed enough to cause the lockups?

[old_geekster]

Absolutely!!  Heat is definitely your enemy and can cause lockups.  What you described can certainly cause heat.

[palealien]

Tried a few more things and hopefully this will be the last question.

Stays up indefinitely in Safe mode, running scandisk/sys restore unsuccessful so far.

Boots only with the "bad" drive, won't even recognize two other known good boot drives I keep for this purpose. This generates more of the BIOHD errors, a 1, 3 and 8 respectively.

I found an identical board, but somehow don't think this is the whole problem. It's cheap enough, but if I spend more $ I'd rather apply it to a new box anyway.

So- Is it unreasonable to think that this could be two more or less unrelated problems, a drive fault as well a motherboard problem? I know anything is possible, it just seem like I am missing something. The processor was buried in dust, maybe cauing permanent damage, and the spare drives have been on the shelf until now.

Forgot to mention it's a DX-7500, maybe there were known issues you may have heard of.

Thanks for your interest and help so far.

[old_geekster]

@palealien, have you tried using different cables to connect the boot drive?  The BIOHD-1 is a communication problem that could be caused by faulty cables.

Also, which model is yours: Microtower or Small Form Factor?