Flare Sci-Fi Forums: Dodgy Hard Drive

This is topic Dodgy Hard Drive in forum Officers' Lounge at Flare Sci-Fi Forums.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://flare.solareclipse.net/ultimatebb.php/topic/10/1603.html

Posted by The Talented Mr. Gurgeh (Member # 318) on :

*** OLD THREAD ***

I'm posting this in the hope that someone can shed some light on a problem I'm having with a 486 DX100.

Basically what happens is:
The first time I turn it on in the day (or after it's been off for a long while) it boots up and works fine. Sooner or later (usually ~30min) the thing crashes. When I do a hard reboot it turns on, but won't get as far as the RAM check.

I initially thought that the fan on the CPU must be damaged and that it heated up, causing the crash, but I started the PC with the cover off and the fan seemed to be working fine, even after the crash.

When I try to boot up after the crash, the hard drive seems to load and then just stop completely, so I'm beginning to think the hard drive is screwed, but it just doesn't make sense to me why it works when it's been off for a while. The drive is only 3% fragmented so that's not the problem.

I tried connecting the hard drive to IDE2 instead of IDE1, but I'm not sure how to change the Master/Slave stuff in the setup. Auto detect won't pick up the hard drive if it's plugged into IDE2. I haven't checked the model or brand of the hard drive but I'll edit this post and put it in when I get a chance.

If anyone knows anything, your advice (apart from chucking the thing out) would be appreciated.

------------------
*Kenshiro gets off bed made from solid stone*
*Bed made from solid stone explodes*
Fist of the North Star

[This message has been edited by Gurgeh (edited May 24, 2001).]

Posted by Dukhat (Member # 341) on :

One of the magazines we record at my recording studio is Smart Computing. Just for shits & giggles, you might try to ask them: [email protected]

------------------
Star Trek: Legacy -
Timeline of Pertinent Events

Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :

Good God, is everyone suddenly having PC problems? Just as well you have an experienced IT professional on the scene! On a computer this old, it could be anything. . . the memory, the chip, the motherboard. I don't think it's the HD, somehow - it either wouldn't work at all, or the problems would manifest earlier.

------------------
Luke Ford: "What's it like having a dick in your ass?"

Zoe: "Imagine taking your bottom lip and pulling it over the top of your head. You get used to it but it does hurt."

Posted by Jeff Raven (Member # 20) on :

I know what the problem is. The computer suffers from obsoletitis. As with all modern products, computers have a built-in obselescence, and it sounds like this one is on its way out. Vogon is correct, it could be anything, or everything. Our 586 was doing this for several months til it truly died. Turned out the power supply AND the processor was bad. The cure was a 1000mghz AMD Athlon.

------------------
"You must give in to tock." - The First One

Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :

I have a 486DX2 50MHz in my room which works fine... strangly enough I have fewer problems with it than I do on this modern computer.

The cure for my problem comes next month when I'll have enough money to buy the Dell I want.

------------------
"Great Idea!!" - DARKSTAR
This post is sponsored in part by the Federation Starship Datalink

[This message has been edited by Hobbes (edited January 17, 2001).]

Posted by Charles Capps (Member # 9) on :

This is one of the cases where I'd do a cable jiggle and then a card reset...

------------------
"Babies are squirmy, ugly, dirty, smelly, and noisy. They'd offend all five of my senses if I had any reason to lick one..."
-- TSN, 2001.01.11 23:27, PhoenixChat

Posted by The Talented Mr. Gurgeh (Member # 318) on :

What's a card reset?

------------------
*Kenshiro gets off bed made from solid stone*
*Bed made from solid stone explodes*
Fist of the North Star

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

You throw playing cards at the front of your case until one of them hits the the reset button.

Yes, CC has odd pastimes, but what do you expect from a man w/ sheep?

------------------
My new year's resolution is the same as last year's: 1024x768.

Posted by The Talented Mr. Gurgeh (Member # 318) on :

I s'pose I'd better get me a deck of cards then.

------------------
*Kenshiro gets off bed made from solid stone*
*Bed made from solid stone explodes*
Fist of the North Star

Posted by Charles Capps (Member # 9) on :

Card reset... taking out all the cards from the slots, cleaning off the contacts, then putting them back in place...

------------------
"Babies are squirmy, ugly, dirty, smelly, and noisy. They'd offend all five of my senses if I had any reason to lick one..."
-- TSN, 2001.01.11 23:27, PhoenixChat

Posted by Teelie (Member # 280) on :

Who's up for Fizzbin?

Posted by Charles Capps (Member # 9) on :

*TWITCH*

Fizzbin!? WHERE!?!? *looks around* The Keelers must DIIIIEEEE! *gets out the correction fluid*

------------------
"Babies are squirmy, ugly, dirty, smelly, and noisy. They'd offend all five of my senses if I had any reason to lick one..."
-- TSN, 2001.01.11 23:27, PhoenixChat

Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :

The old memory-slots and cards were very easy to break. Especially when they get older they go bad. You said yourself that it sometimes doesn't get past the memory-check.
What OS do you use? A new system perhaps challenges the memory-banks. I know old win95 needed at least 32mb to run smooth, and W2K or Me could be wearing down the RAM.

Jeff: You have a 1000-Mega/Gigahertz processor? Kewl!

------------------
Here lies a toppled god,
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.

-Tleilaxu Epigram

Posted by The Talented Mr. Gurgeh (Member # 318) on :

Well, it's a DX 100Mhz with only 8mb of RAM, and I had Win 95 on it. It actually ran quite well, believe it or not. I had no problems multi-tasking (within reason). It worked fine for years. It's the complete spontaneity of the thing that confuses me. I might try a card reset if I get a chance.

------------------
*Kenshiro gets off bed made from solid stone*
*Bed made from solid stone explodes*
Fist of the North Star

Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :

I'd try to get hold of some more old memory if I were you. 64mb would be very cheap. Those old-style memories are going out of style anyway.

------------------
Here lies a toppled god,
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.

-Tleilaxu Epigram

[This message has been edited by Nimrod (edited January 19, 2001).]

Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :

If you know anyone with another old system try your HDD in it.

------------------
"One's ethics are determined by what we do when no one is looking" Nugget

Posted by The Talented Mr. Gurgeh (Member # 318) on :

How about I pick it up and drop it repeatedly until it works?

Nah, I think it's on it's last legs. Thanks for the advice though.

------------------
*Kenshiro gets off bed made from solid stone*
*Bed made from solid stone explodes*
Fist of the North Star

[This message has been edited by Gurgeh (edited January 22, 2001).]

Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :

That maybe the problem, it has legs....

------------------
"One's ethics are determined by what we do when no one is looking" Nugget

Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :

It gets to the point when you just have to write your computer off. At work many of our machines are now 3 years old - 133MMXs with 2 GB HDDs and 32 MB RAM - and I've just heard we've budgeted to replace at least a hundred this year. Mind you, my home PC is a 200MMX, older than that, and it's still going strong - granted I have quadrupled the memory and disk space, though.

------------------
"Businesses used to be like Christianity; if you were faithful and obedient, you could obtain bliss in the afterlife of retirement. Now it's more of a reincarnation model. If the worker learns enough in his current job, he can progress to a higher level of employment elsewhere."

- Dogbert

Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :

I doubt you do much "fragging", as the young call it, as well.

------------------
"And Mojo was hurt and I would have kissed his little boo boo but then I realized he was a BAD monkey so I KICKED HIM IN HIS FACE!"
-Bubbles

Posted by Malnurtured Snay (Member # 411) on :

Are you insinuating that he can no longer "get it up?", Liam? Really!

(Forgive me -- slightly drunk!)

------------------
Star Trek Gamma Quadrant
Average Rated 6.83 out of 10 Smileys by Fabrux
***
"Oh, yes, screw logic, let's go for a theory with no evidence!"
-Forum Member Who Shall Be Nameless. 11:48am, Jan. 19th, 2001

Posted by Vacuum robot lady from Spaceballs (Member # 239) on :

Well, you probably shouldn't be posting then.

Some of us do have murderous rages that are brought on by other people's incoherent stupidity. Be warned.

------------------
"...screw logic, let's go for a theory with no evidence!" - Omega.

Irony ensues.

Free Jeff K

Posted by Malnurtured Snay (Member # 411) on :

Indeed, UM? Thankfully, I'm quite a bit away from you, so I dare say I'll survive.

Posted by Teelie (Member # 280) on :

There was a touch of stupidity but not that much and it didn't look all that incoherent to me either...

Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :

I've lost the thread here. Somebody seemed to be implying my legendary sexual stamina isn't what it used to be. Granted, I'm not Ultra Magnus, and I'm certainly not Sol, but I think I do OK. 8)

- Dogbert

Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :

But how much better would you do if you did UM? Hmm?

------------------
"And Mojo was hurt and I would have kissed his little boo boo but then I realized he was a BAD monkey so I KICKED HIM IN HIS FACE!"
-Bubbles

Posted by Vacuum robot lady from Spaceballs (Member # 239) on :

Much better, I would assume. Chart Topping better.

So much better, in fact, that if you went to a 7-11 and asked for their best slurpie, but you didn't have enough money, so you asked for the best slurpie you could buy for $0.40, and you spilled some on the ground near a hobo who licked it up, it be better than that.

------------------
"...screw logic, let's go for a theory with no evidence!" - Omega.

Irony ensues.

Free Jeff K

Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :

Woah. Does this guy know how to party, or what? 8)

- Dogbert

Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :

Yeah! He's the most party-tastic hobo in town!

------------------
"And Mojo was hurt and I would have kissed his little boo boo but then I realized he was a BAD monkey so I KICKED HIM IN HIS FACE!"
-Bubbles

Posted by The Talented Mr. Gurgeh (Member # 318) on :

I'm resurrecting this thread for posterity. I remembered I had started this thread and not mentioned that I fixed the problem. The problem I mentioned about kept bugging me for a few weeks, and nothing I tried would work. However, I chanced asking the admin at our college, in case he knew, and he suggested that the power connectors on the mother board were corroded, ie. the point where the power cable from the adaptor plugs into the board. So following his advice I repeatedly unplugged and plugged the connector in order to physically scrape off the corrosion, and it worked, the PC booted up fine after that and hardly never crashes now.

Unfortunately something's gone wrong with the video drivers and now I've to fix that.

------------------
"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen"
Samuel Adams

Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :

Sometimes it's the most simple stuff that throws a monkey wrench into computing. Last week, I reformatted the hard drive on my little laptop. I was having major problems with defragmenter and scandisk working, so I just scrapped it all. I used the system restoration disk that came with my computer.

Well, after installing everything to factory specs and restoring all the drivers for the sound card, video card, gameport, etc., my laptop refused to restart. It would hit the "Windows is Shutting Down" screen and freeze. It shutdown just fine, and it restarted in MS-DOS mode just peachy. But it would not do a restart in Windows.

I contacted my laptop's technical support people. They couldn't figure it out. So then I turned to the Microsoft home page and (low and behold) found a help article on the problem and seven different trouble-shooting strategies. After three days of trying to figure out the problem, it took me two hours to nail down the problem to a corrupted sound card driver.

Since getting a newer version of the driver, I've no problems since then. And that big headache was caused by something so simple as a corrupted driver.

Who's side is technology on, anyway?

------------------
God (using a Devil hand puppet): Yaagh! I'm the Devil! I'm evil! I'm spooky! I'm dark! And I'm evil! Gimme an "E!" Gimme a "V!" Gimme a "U!" Gimme an "L!" What's that spell? Evil! Goooo EVIL!
Devil: Hey, yo, that shit ain't funny!
--from Tatsuya Ishida's Sinfest

Founder, president, CEO, CFO, COO, under-secretary general, mascot, and caterer of the APAO

Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :

Hmm. Well, I just acquired a 256 Meg RAM chip for my PC, yet I can only use it by itself - if I add one of my old 64 Meg ones as well, it detects only that. Strange, but I'm not particularly bothered; after all I do now have a quarter-Gig of memory!

------------------
"If Morden is afraid of green penguins, and Draal is shown to have
access to them, a speculation would be that Draal will use them
against Morden in the future. However if Draal only has a purple
moose, saying that he could use it against Morden would be a story
idea."

- rastb5m FAQ

Phasers

Posted by Jeff Raven (Member # 20) on :

Probably because your 256 is PC100 or 133, and your 64's are 66.

------------------
"Goverment exists to serve, not to lead. We do not exist by its volition, it exists by ours. Bear that in mind when you insult your neighbors for refusing to bow before it." J. Richmond

Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :

That wouldn't affect it. If Lee had a fast CPU, then the slow RAM wouldn't be able to feed the processor fast enough, and wait states would be inserted. The computer would still run, and since the slow RAM is the old stuff, the computer wouldn't be any slower.

Not that that matters anyway. Lee has a 200mhz MMX. I suspect that they don't run with a bus speed of 100 and a multiplier of 2. 66 and a multiplier of 3 sounds much more likely. So he wouldn't need PC-100 RAM anyway.

I think it's because, in old PC systems, the SDRAM boards all had to be of the same memory size. Although a 200MMX is really old. Does it use double sided memory chips? I'd assume that it would have to, as I can't see you finding a 256mb chip for old memory types.

------------------
You know, when Comedy Central asked us to do a Thanksgiving episode, the first thought that went through my mind was, "Boy, I'd like to have sex with Jennifer Aniston."
-Trey Parker, co-creator of South Park

Posted by Gaseous Anomaly (Member # 114) on :

This is why...

I WILL NEVER OWN A COMPUTER IF I CAN HELP IT UNTIL THE DAY I DIE!!!

I hate the...finnickiness (for want of a better word) of them - they crave attention, there's always some tiny thing wrong with them that'll fuck up EVERYTHING , and it's always near impossible to discover what's wrong with it!

GAAAAHH!!! Dogs abortions all!!

------------------
At that point, McDonald fired his gun three times in the air to emphasize his point. The crowd, estimated at 350,000, loudly cheered the new candidate.

"Let me make this clear: I am the law! I am your ruler! And you will have fries with that, motherf*cker!"

Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :

The last "problem" I had with my computer was that I ran out of hard drive space. So I bought a 20GB Fujitsu drive for a thousand Kr (100$) and all was well. I reinstalled Win98SE, transferred the files I wanted to bring from the old one and all is fine now.

The only thing that will be remotely necessary to upgrade during the next twelve months is mayyybe the 3d card.
I have a GeForce DDR 32MB, works fine. But in a year, maybe the games will be so heavy in graphics that I want to smooth it out. I think the GeForce 3 will have gone down in price by then, it's already gone from 470$ to 380$ here in Sweden.

------------------
"Babies haven't any hair;
old men's heads are just as bare;
between the cradle and the grave
lies a haircut and a shave."

Samuel Hoffenstein

Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :

Actually, all the memory I have - the two 64 Megs, and the 256 - are 100 Mhz SDRAM. I know this (they never actually label the fucking things) because the PCs I nicked them from will only take 100 MHz SDRAM (as we found out when we tried to boost their memory using chips from older PCs).

It's no big deal really; I've already doubled my memory in one fell swoop, so what if I can't increase it again by a quarter? When I get a new PC (which I'll soon have to bite the bullet and do) I'll put my one remaining 64 chip back in the old PC, flog it to a friend and save the quarter-Gig one for my new one.

- rastb5m FAQ

Phasers

Posted by The Red Admiral (Member # 602) on :

....well my job is to breath life into various jurassic period PCs like 486's with bizarre, mystifying problems. (as well as working on modern machines as well, of course). But I can spend a day just searching for solutions to a small problem. But PsyLiam is right. You can't mix memory chips like that, ie a PC 133 with a PC 66. A lot of Boards will only take paired chips, like two 64's, and built by the same manufacturer. But any potential screwup can be a combination of many things.

Computers are great when they work, pains in the asses when they don't, and you'd be so suprised how many problems can be tracked down to memory problems/conflicts.

But they don't give me as many headaches as modems. They are the most nightmarish peripheral devices to work on. I hate the damn things... LOL

------------------
"Synthetic scotch, synthetic Commanders...."
-Scotty

http://www.trekmania.net

Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :

Er, I didn't say that. I said that the "speed" of the memory would hav eno affect on whether or not it wasd accepted. It would just affect the overall speed of the computer. You could put PC-66 RAm in a PIII 500, and it would work. It'd just slow it down.

And, to correct a common misconception (sit down at the back):
Memory does not have "speed" as such. There is no such thing as 100mhz SDRAM. RAM speed is measured in terms of "latency". The lower the latency, the faster the RAM can feed info to the CPU. When motherboards got up to 100mhz, it was found that a lot of current SDRAM was too slow to cope with the increase in speed. All RAM that had a low enough latency to cope was labelled PC-100 RAM, for ease of identification. And older RAM was retroactively labelled PC-66.

Low latency RAM will work fine in a slow machine. PC-100 can be put into a Pentium 100 if you want. And it will operate comfortably. Put it in a PIII 500, and it will work to it's limit. Stick it in a brand new P4 that's faster than Sol after a woman, and it will struggle.

Good day.

Posted by infinity11 (Member # 531) on :

quote:
Stick it in a brand new P4 that's faster than Sol after a woman, and it will struggle.

LOL, I joined this board to late to know about the Sol jokes, but if someone could clarify, cuz I keep hearing stuff about Sol's penis and stuff of that nature, and it's scaring me

Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :

I am now worried that someone will post a "hilarious" response to this. To prevent me from having to become violent, I shall ruin it for you all.

Simon has a very large penis. End of story.

(Actually, if he turns around when excited, it's the end of several stories. And whole buildings. *rim shot*)

Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :

The insidious genius of this particular injoke is that I can never deny it.

Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :

Yes! BWAHAHAHA!

Besides, it's kinda hard for you to deny it anyway. Anyone standing within 100 feet of you could confirm it.

As an aside, I never get bored of jokes. I don't. I will keep them going and going and going until you all get so mad, you will tell me I have no time to survive make my time.