Spring RTS Engine

I decided to install a new 250GB sata drive onto my comp, and as I needed the IDE drive I had in there for another PC I cloned the old drive onto the new one.
Everything seemed to be going fine untill I started to get the occasional BSoD, and I crashed out of a game of DoW and then Spring after about 5 minutes.
So I then wiped and rebuilt but still I have the same problem (though I'm not sure if I'm still getting BSoD, the ingame crashes are just a complete system freeze).
If anyone knows of any HD checking tools or has had this sort of problem then I could do with some help.

What are you using to clone the drive?
I did this a few days ago and mine works fine. both drives were maxtor and I used their maxblast cd.

I used a free version of a program called hdclone, but since I reformatted the partition containing windows before reinstalling I don't think the clonings to blame.

run memory tests. If that doesn't show up anything wrong, try replacing your power supply. For that matter, your power supply might not be supplying enough voltage in the first place.

How many watts is yours?

install the latest controller (chipset) drivers.


The best utility to check your disk is the utility provided by the manufacturer, see manufacturer support site. (often bootable floppy/cdrom image)

Any other utility that can read out the disk's SMART attributes is also good, begin with the windows system log.

The powersupply is a Akasa 460w duel rail thingy and has been fine up unitll now.

The utility on the manufactureres site (maxtor) only works on ide drives and the drive is a sata one.

Event viewer (as usual) has nothing helpfull logged in any of the logs. Just the normal startup entrys after each crash.

I'm using an nForce 4 chipset on my board and I installed the latest drivers when I reinstalled windows.

On the plus side it hasn't crashed in 3 hours of non-gaming applications so I may have partially fixed it when I rebuilt it.

Try cleaning the cooling fans.

1. LOL

2. Vapo-chill cpu coolers are fricken awesome

3. I'm glad I set a paranoid-esq low cpu temp system shutdown.

Cheers' for all the replys, of course what I'd done was manage to disable the fan on my cpu when installing my new HD, and as I've got the emergency shutdown temp at 55* it would shut down about 5 minutes into playing spring.

Still my cpu cooler rocks. Just acting as a pasive cooling system it survived HW2, Doom 3, 12 minutes of cpu stability testing, almost unlimited system up time (with low level stuff like opera nad VLC player running), and all the graphics card tests and the first 30 frames of the cpu test on 3DMark 06. Seriously, the best 20 odd quid I've ever spent on a piece of hardware.
Oh and this is all on an overclocked AMD3000 64bit (I run it at 2300) :)