Oh, bummer, no floppy disk? That's too bad, it makes it a lot easier to diagnose the errors.

Ok, then download Ultimate boot cd, that will create a boot cd with all the tools you'll need. Burn it to disk, then boot with it. You'll be using the hitachi/ibm option for hard disk checking.

There's also a straight windows version if you want that, but it shouldn't matter.

Use the basic version if you use the first link download, not the advanced one.

I wouldn't use the windows version, it's not easy to create the cd I think.
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Ah- page two...

Before I DL and start the test: this is looking a little familiar, like when tech guy #2 booted with a utility like spinrite or something like that.

I will give this a shot and post the results. Just to be clear, this utility does not correct errors, right?

And did I already ask you if my data will be corrupt when I transfer it to a decent drive if i determine that this one is idneed toast?
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Is this the one?

www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
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Yes, that should do it, I assume Hitachi supports IBM also. The boot utility disk definitely does, I tried it, it will test the ibm explicitly.

At this point, if you get errors, there's no point in correcting them. When you correct a hard drive error, the data on that sector will be lost no matter what, the sector will be lost, it's already lost, correcting it just makes it official, and also windows won't write to that sector again, but it won't know when new sectors get damaged, and will write to those, that's probably what's been happening, that's why your stuff will run for a while then stops again, all signs point to that anyway.

What happens, more or less, is that the hard disk has a table at its beginning, that tells the operating system, windows in this case, which sectors are bad, so it won't write to them again. But if there is something on those, it's gone, but sometimes that's just a partial file.

Once it's fairly certain that it's the hard drive, I'd order one of the maxtors, install it as master, run your current defective one as slave, then reinstall windows on the new one, transfer all the data from the old one to the new one, then throw the old one away.

Again, some of your data will be corrupt, but there's no way to know what that will be. For example, I had disk errors recently, I knew there was data loss, but it took me a while to find it, I opened up a programming file, and one single line of code was missing from it, literally. Didn't run, had to redo it, but it was interesting, there was literally that line of code missing, that was all that was missing.

Depends on the level of damage, last time I looked at a bad ibm, it was really bad, seriously f##ked up, data messed up all over, windows would just barely boot it was so bad.

By the way, hopefully you never tried overclocking the system, if you did, there could be other problems, motherboard/processor related. Those are extremely difficult to diagnose.

Oh, make absolutely sure you've got all the viruses off the current disk before you expose a new OS install to it.
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I need to ammend some info:

Weird thing- my invoice says I have the IBM hard drive but wondows ays its actually a Western Digital (WD 1200JB-00CRA1). I dont have any more info on it until i take it out and look at it.

Also, I dont know if this matters, but I partitioned my drive so that widnows can be reinstalled without wiping all my files.

Does this change things? Shoudl I still look for a utility to test this WD drive? Still seem a likley culprit? This route seems familiar. Couldnt it be some tiny, unfathomable defective capacitor or piece of wire that Ill never ever find?

Also, I got a virtual memory error tongiht and checked it- no paging file or some BS set up wierd in there form somebody- changed it back, noticing some performance boost of course.


Goign to turn it and try to tackle this again tomorrow.

Thanks,

Julian
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Oh, OK, yes, that changes things significantly.

Windows will report the drive that's in there, so test the western digital, all drives can fail.

Your partitioning of the disk is an unexpected and pleasant surprise, that's the absolute right way to do it, for exactly these reasons.

I usually give Windows, or any operating system, about 12 gig of space, that's more than enough, 20 if you really want to give lots of room.

then I put all the data on other partitions, including email and my documents, both relatively easy to do.

That means that no matter what happens, unless you get a full disk failure of course, you'll have your data, then all you have to do is reinstall the operating system, reconnect to various folders on the other partitions, then reinstall all the programs. Still work, but better than if it's all one big partition. The habit of putting everything on one enormous partition is a bad one, but it persists.

Definitely test the western digital, if you get errors on it, dump it.

I'd also run memtest overnight just to make sure that the memory is good, it will just loop over and over, but there might be errors that only appear when the memory gets hot enough or something.

Fried capacitors are always possible, but are also unfortunately not visible to the eye in most cases, if they are visible, the mobo is toast without any question. If any capacitor is oozing, that would be the problem, and you'd have your solution, new box basically, or at least new mobo, your processor is a good one, no need to upgrade.

No surprise on the hard drive though, it may have already been replaced, hard to say. Or you may have lucked out.

Please post the extended error codes from the event system log viewer, the descriptions, those particular error messages have too many causes, need more info on that.

If someone set your windows swap file, they call it 'paging file' to any of the following:

less than 512 mB
on another partition

you could definitely have issues with that, the windows swap file is a primitive beast, and really prefers to only live on the windows partition, unlike more advanced stuff like Linux uses.

To see your swap file location and size, go to 'control panel' -> system -> advanced then select 'performance options', make sure it's set to prefer 'applications', then check the size, it should be at least 512 mB, especially if you're doing graphics. Click on the 'change' button, make sure it's located on your c: drive, asssuming windows is on the c drive. I set that to have the same minimum and maximum size, improves performance, set it to say 750 mB or so, min and max, if it's not already that way.

If you see issues there, that also could be the cause of your problems. If you're running stuff like photoshop and macromedia products, those are massive memory hogs.

One thing that really stresses a defective system is lots of swapping and writing to disk/memory, for graphics you should be running 1 gig of ram for best performance.

After checking all this, reboot, open some graphics stuff, work on it, open some more, have a bunch of stuff open, then check the event viewer to see if and when red flags appeared. Note the times you open stuff, and compare it to the red flag times, for example, do the red flags appear on boot, or thereabouts, or do they appear when you open large files.

The main thing that argues against mobo/capacitor issues is that the system was unstable, then was stable when the hard disk was serviced. Mobo issues don't tend to go away since they are physical, a component is failing that is.

You can probably use the hitachi utility to check the hard disk, try it, it won't kill it, it will just report the errors. If it's the same thingi as the ibm test utility, you'll get some code when it's done, like 0x0 [means it's good], write down the code after the test. If it's a plain text error report, write that down.
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Yes, partition = good.

So, use the Hitachi test anyway? Sounds like thats what youre saying. i will try this tonight, though Im still not familiar with using ISOs to make the boot CD. will write down any error codes.

I dont ememebr seeign anythign out of place on the MB but ill look closely.

Also, indeed I do run the whole creative suite, often all three apps at once, plus Torrents, plus a movie, etc. i game pretty hard with this box as well. maybe its time to get more RAM?

memtest didtn turn up anything before. will run again. right now im just runnign the one corsair stick. ive also heard that software testing ram can be inconclusive, that theres some sepcific machine to do it...

Again, yes, the reboots fade with windows reinstalls and other maintenence, then come back more and more often. There was also some pretty crazy visual artifacts associated with crash (purple 8bit weirdness) before i had it cleaned, etc that made me worry about the video card but ihavent seen that since.

will do some more testign tonight/tomorrow and repost.

Thanks again!
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Yes, test the drive, every single sign points to that. No signs point to your motherboard, if it recovers on reinstall, windows itself is getting corrupted.

If the video card works fine on reinstall, with fresh drivers, it's probably fine.

If this stuff starts degrading over time, it strongly suggests that the hard drive is losing sectors, and so losing physical parts of files, which of course will lead to instability.

If you're using the native XP junk cd burning utility, I can't help, wouldn't touch it, but I suspect all you do is right click on the iso and select burn to disk.

With real cd burning software like nero, you just open nero, select 'write image', browse to the .iso file, and burn it. Pretty basic.

Currently nothing points to any other issue, especially if the stuff runs well for a while. Bad memory is a remote possibility, but not likely, and also easy to test for, just swap sticks if you have another 512 mB one, run it, if it's still unstable, it's almost for sure not the memory.

if you run the box hard, it's not surprising the disk is failing by the way, with the full suite of graphics apps open plus everything else, the hard disk will max out on memory, go to page file, and if it's not set high enough, will actually give the 'out of memory' error.

You need to run a gig, I'd try it with both sticks after trying it with only the other one, then I'd put them both in, if they are the same speed, you might have luck, kingston and corsair have roughly the same quality, but I wouldn't mix different speeds, like pc2700 and pc2100, that will just drop system performance down a big notch.

There's sales on good memory all the time, 1 gig, matched 512 sticks for about $90, zipzoomfly.com always has that on its front page, usually it's corsair, sometimes micron if you luck out.
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Hey sorry, Im lackign some basic knowledge to move forward with the test:

I have nero, but I cant just "make a date disk", right? I have to copy disk or somethign like that? Can you walk me through making a boot disk from nero?

Also, How do I get the comp to boot from the CD drive? i dotn think I have it set.

Sorry abtou the rudimentary stuff.

Also, I do belive my stick were mismatched.

J.
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If you have the real nero, not nero express, all you do is start it, close the wizard thing if you use that, then click 'file -> burn image'.

That's it, you navigate to where the image is, click on it, and nero burns it.

then you boot up with that cd in the cdrom drive. Many times the bios is set to boot off cd rom first, then hard drive, if that's the case, it will just boot by itself off the cd rom.

If it's not, you have to go into your bios and set the boot priority, that's usually in one of the first three sections in the bios, save changes using F10 then exit, and it will reboot into the cdrom if there is one, my guess though is it's already set to boot with cdrom as first option.
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