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CareBear
March 6th, 2003, 09:33
I think one of my computers is trying its very best to infuriate me :angry2:

It's a 500Mhz and the plan was to put it in another room but swap the 20Gb that was in it with a 60Gb I have to spare now and reinstall Win2k.
I swapped the hard disks, turned the power on, put the Win2k cd in it and it booted happily. After the formatting the problems began though, it would give a "file error" during copying which indicated the files got corrupted while being transferred from CD to harddisk.
So I used another Win2k cd but ran into the same problem. I kept trying but nothing seemed to make it go away so eventually I put the 20Gb disk back in and booted and got greeted by a "inaccessable boot device" Win2k blue screen.
When I tried to install Win2k onto the old 20Gb disk (which Win2k had been running off quite happily for the past 2 years) same problem as mentioned before.. around 18% it starts giving file copying errors.
I put both disks into another computer, used the same cd, tried installing Win2k on both of them.. no problems whatsoever.

Summary of what all I've tried right now:

harddisk primary master - cdrom drive secondary master
harddisk secondary master - cd-rom drive secondary slave
changed the cables of both primary and secondary controllers with ones I know work
updated the bios
fiddled with every possible setting in the bios
ran the Seagate Disk Diagnostic tools.. it runs an internal hd test which completed fine and then a test run through the disk controller (only tests read though, it doesn't write to the disk) and both completed without errors
removed every card plugged into the slots (video is onboard for that one)
reset CMOS several times
dissasembled the whole thing and put it back together piece by piece
disabled UDMA and put both harddisk and cd-rom on PIO mode


So right now I'm completely clueless... :confused2 anyone have *any* ideas? I refuse to give up on it until it's fixed. It worked fine yesterday and all of two years before. :mad:
It boots Win2k from cd-rom, it goes through the format process and the recovery console works fine too.. it reads from the harddisk fine too. Just seems that things gets messed up when it tries to write to the harddisk :confused2

Daniel
March 6th, 2003, 13:21
Either your harddrive is already ruined(IBM?) or your ide controller sucks...


Try switching motherboards or ide controllers.

CareBear
March 6th, 2003, 13:38
The harddisk(s) are all fine.. that was my first thought when it wouldn't install but I plugged them into another computer and did a Win2k install and they work perfectly :confused2

Right now I'm assuming it's the IDE controller (I put in a new cd-rom drive in case that was the problem which it wasn't) but it boots the Win2k and Win2003 cds fine.. it's just when it starts copying files that the problem occurs :confused2

Does anyone happen to know a - free - DOS based harddisk test/diagnostic program (or anything I can boot from floppy or cd)? I only found ones that do read tests so far and I think the problem is with writes.

_Street_Fighter
March 6th, 2003, 17:18
did you make a bootdisk before you tried to reinstall it? i usually make bootdisks so they come with my cdrom drivers and stuff when the comp crashes or something... did you try running fdisk? tried deleting all the partitions and creating a new one? did you format the hard drive (try to do a full format, not a quick one)?

one of my friend's comp was slow and he tried to reinstall windows xp and it didnt work (the setup crashed when the files were being copied) and when he was installing xp, he kept doing a quick format b/c he didnt want to wait for full format. after i got there and did a full format, the setup worked fine =P

- SF

CareBear
March 7th, 2003, 02:52
I eventually tracked it down... of all possible things it was a stick of RAM that caused the data on the HD to get corrupted. :confused2

jurupa
March 7th, 2003, 03:06
Another reason a Mac user would point out why PC's suck, unless its a Mac:p

CareBear
March 7th, 2003, 05:18
Originally posted by jurupa
Another reason a Mac user would point out why PC's suck, unless its a Mac:p It was the kind of problem that could have happened to a Mac as well.
It's just another reason why I should get ECC memory in the future :p

(I think I know what happened to the stick that made it go bad.. apparantly companies are dumb enough to make their warrenty stickers partly in plastic.. which of course get soft when it's heated and eventually melted and fused together with the ram chips on the stick)

Daniel
March 7th, 2003, 07:12
Originally posted by jurupa
Another reason a Mac user would point out why PC's suck, unless its a Mac:p

That's an ignorant statement.

Mac uses the exact same type of RAM that PC's do.

jurupa
March 7th, 2003, 18:04
Originally posted by Daniel
That's an ignorant statement.

Mac uses the exact same type of RAM that PC's do.

I was only joking ssh. Don't take it to personally. I have a couple of PC's. Two on Linux, one on Windows.