computer on the fritz

[Kraellin]

this is somewhat directed at gary richardson, whose hardware wisdom i trust, but please, anyone, feel free to comment.

my computer has lasted a good long time, probably 4 or 5 years now, but finally blew a gasket...somewhere. it started showing signs a few days ago, at least obvious signs and maybe a few signs, not so obvious for a bit longer than that. it acts like a heat problem, mostly. the machine would boot up ok and everything start up as normal. tonight, it just suddenly turned off. on rebooting it started up again and after only a few minutes, seemed to go into sleep mode, except i couldnt bring it back out. the harddrive light stayed on continuously and i finally had to just kill the power.

now, once or twice prior to tonight, i had similar things happen. i didnt think too much about it since computers do do odd things at times. but tonight it was persistent and i couldnt keep the machine up more than a minute or so and then it would simply turn off, not even a harddrive light on. it would simply shut down.

now, the only thing i've got to go on as a possible cause is dirt. normally, i clean the fans every once in a while and even the heatsinks. but, i'd gotten lazy about this and hadnt done it in a while. when i checked the fan blades they were pretty dirty, but they were working. i cleaned them, both the cpu fan and the power supply one and tried booting up again. still the same problem.

so, i took a closer look at the cpu fan and heat sink and sure enough, the heat sink was filthy, surely blocking air flow. so, i took it off the cpu and thoroughly cleaned it and re-installed it. i tried rebooting again and still the same problem.

so, i'm only guessing here, but i'm guessing something got too hot and has deteriorated to the point where, when it's still cool, it can boot up, but then gets hot too fast and thermal cutoffs then shut things down.

ok, that's all guesses. what i'd like to know, or at least hear about is, is there a way, short of replacing, cpu, motherboard, and/or the power supply to get this machine back up and running? there is still thermal paste between the heat sink and cpu, so that seems ok. i also noticed that some capacitors near the heatsink have something that looks like corrosion on the tops and when i rake a nail across them it comes off in flakes. heat damage to the capacitors? something else?

it doesnt act like a harddrive, at least not a way that i'm familiar with. it does boot up...or did before this got worse. it acts like a heat problem and i'm guessing the clogged heatsinks caused some damage to the cpu or nearby parts. but i guess i'd sort of like some at least semi-confirmation on this before i go out and buy a new motherboard and cpu.

so, any help here would be welcome.

craig

[NancyJ]

Does sound like a heat issue, but not necessarily a disastrous one (though if it is corrosion then you probably do need an new MOBO - could be burn dirt tho ) - have you checked that all the fans are working when the machine is on?
If it boots up cold but then shuts off and wont reboot, almost definately a heat issue - can you get into your bios? It should give you information about fan speeds and temperatures.
My mum had a similar problem with her laptop that went on for ages, took one look at it - CPU fan had bust - was fine with a pastic freezer block on it till she got a new fan, despite running it for months in this condition there was no permanent damage.
You say theres still thermal paste left between the heat sink and the CPU?! thats pretty incredible, I have to replace mine any time I remove the heatsink. Are you sure its in the right place? It might ooze out the sides a little but the CPU generally melts its mark as soon as the two meet. But then again - I'm running an Athlon and they do run a little hotter than pentiums.

[Littlecoo]

It may be worth your while to check and clean your video card and ram slots as well (incl fan/heatsink on vid card if applicable).

[Littlecoo]

Lol Nancy, I used to have an athlon...great as a heat source during winter, but in the summer it turned into a miniature sun, one day it went supernova and left a lovely crater in the motherboard- yay!

[Photo678]

start pulling ram chips out and see if there are any changes....faulty ram can mimic anything from a bad monitor to a fried mobo

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Craig,

Looks almost certain that its a temp problem.

Easiest way I know to check, is to buy a freeezer spray (available from Radio Shack or that type of store), try cooling processor right down before starting, and see if it takes any longer before the problem recurs.

This should confirm whether its temp or not.

The caking on the capacitors could be due to electrolyte leakage when they got too hot (only the electrolytic capacitors (can type) will suffer this way), though it has to get damned hot to do this. Any scorch marks on the board?

Fan may not be running at full revs if its on the way out, and therefore may not be cooling efficiently (new fan is cheaper than new boards, so may be worth trying).

[Doug Nelson]

I had an almost identical problem, and more than one person that should know about such things indicated it was most likely a microscopic crack on the motherboard that opened when things got hot, and even when things weren't hot sometimes garbled data.

But don't be sad, look at it as a wonderful opportunity to finally upgrade to a 21st century machine!

[mistermonday]

Certyainly seems like a classic thermal shutdown. The only 2 items which have thermal protection are the CPU and Power Supply (former for cost reasons, latter for safety certification). Usually for the CPU the fan dies or the thermal sensor fails. If the sensor goes, freezing it won't help. If you have a freezer, you could freeze the entire box to cool it down enough to give you the extra few minutes req'd to run diagnostics. Particularly to monitor the temp profile of the CPU.
Good luck. Regards, Murray

[Cassidy]

Craig,

If you have capacitors that are stained on the top and your motherboard is a socket 478, this was a common problem with these boards, ie: leaking capacitors. If you have 3 or more bulging and or leaking capacitors, it sounds like you have a board with the faulty capacitors on it. They bulge and leak and even some explode under heat stress. Eventually this is a death nell for the motherboard. If this is the case, your cpu will be fine, it is only motherboard from my experience.

We have seen this problem with Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, Compaq, HP and many other Socket 478 motherboards.

I personally am nursing one of these motherboards myself, knowing full well that I am eventually saving up for a new one (now will be a cpu and motherboard upgrade). I have taken the side off my computer and this has given greater longevity to the leaking capacitor issue.

From recollection, apparently the cheaper inferior capacitors saved something in the order of cents per capacitor at the manufacturing end which was widely taken up by many of the motherboard manufacturers!

[Kraellin]

well, thank you all for the responses. that's exactly what i was looking for. i posted this thread last night and checked it this morning and based on the responses here i checked the motherboard again, only closer this time. i particularly looked at those capacitors again and yes, this is socket 478 machine. there are about 10 of the same type capacitor near the heatsink. they are about an inch tall, cylindrical, and about 3/8 of an inch in diameter. almost every one of them had some type of caked-on white stuff on the tops. so, i dont think it was burned dirt. a few had reddish marks like corrosion or rust and one, in particular, had burn marks on the top.

so, after reading the responses here and looking at the board again and those capacitors, i just decided that was the culprit. it may not be, but it was enough that i just decided it was. so, time to go to the store.

i figured i'd get a new motherboard, cpu, case and power supply and that i had a budget of $300. i also like certain things on my motherboards, like 5 pci slots and 4 ram slots. i wanted at least an agp slot but didnt need pci-e but also wasnt opposed to getting it if it fit the budget. i wasnt really worried about dual core or 64 bit processing, but again, ok if it fit the budget.

understand that what i'm coming from, what burned out, was an e-machine computer with oem windows xp home. it was a 1.7 ghz machine with agp onboard graphics and no normal agp slot (that was a mistake when i bought it). at the time this was supposed to be just an emergency machine for another that had died. it ended up being my main machine. i bought a pci video card and disabled the onboard crap and later upgraded the video card to a better pci card....mind you, not pci-e, but pci. surprisingly, i've never really been disappointed with vid card performance, so dont always buy the hype.

at any rate, even if my diagnosis on the now dead machine was wrong, it was about time for an upgrade. i've had that e-machine for 4 or 5 years now.

so, what i got was a new case with 4 bays, will handle a full atx form factor (the e-machine was micro atx), has front side usb's, 1 large fan and all the standard port stuff on the back. the new motherboard is a Gigabyte K8 Triton series with a 939 cpu slot. this is a 64 bit board. model number is GA-K8U-939. the processor is an AMD Athlon 64 processor, ADA3500DEP4AS.

case with 350 watt power supply = $49.95
motherboard = $68.06
cpu = $211.05
2 year extended warranty on the motherboard = $9.50
sub total = $338.56
tax = $19.74
total = $358.30

so, you can see i went a touch over my $300 budget but i almost always do that when buying computers

i made sure all this would be compatible with what i can save from the old system. the old was using 1 gig of DDR pc 333 ram and the new uses the same. the old nic will work, the old modem with work (though i rarely use it), the vid card will work and so on.

the biggest problem is going to be with windows. since the e-machine machine had oem windows this is not likely going to work with the new system. it may, or so the store guys said, but they also said 'not real likely. maybe a 5% chance it will.". i already have a full version of windows xp home so the task is going to be installing a new version of windows and transferring or re-installing a LOT of software that was on the old system.

so, if anyone's got any ideas on making that less painful, do let me know. i'm currently thinking i'll make a new partition of the space that exists on the current C: drive and install the new windows on that and change the other part to the D: drive. but the old registry is pretty much going to go bye-bye from what little i know of this. i do have the current C: drive backed up fully on an external harddrive, so i can always borrow things back to the new system...somewhat. again, this is sort of where i get lost in all this; what can i keep intact and what cant i? so, again, any help here would be great

anyways, again, thanks for all the help! that was just what i needed

craig

[NancyJ]

When I build a new machine I just stick the old harddrive in the new one and I'm good to go - ofcourse XP changed all that - it doesnt like new CPUs - M$ decided in their infinate wisdom that you buy a copy of windows for your CPU not your computer as a whole - therefore if you get a new cpu you have to get a new copy of windows - but if you dont care about the annoying security alert when you boot up then its fine. But the difference with WinXP is you cant just plug and play the old hard drive - you pretty much have to reinstall. All your software will still be there tho - you just need to reinstall for the stuff that needs the registry entries to work, all your config files and pluigins etc will be intact

I cant believe you would buy an AGP mobo after already making the mistake of getting on-board before.
AGP is dead, they just arent making the cards anymore - by getting a new agp mobo, you're limiting the life of your computer. I game a lot so my gfx card has to be the best I can afford - infact my card costs more than your whole computer (approx £270 - and that was less than I usually pay) but I cant afford a whole new system so I had to buy the best AGP card around - ever, they're just not going to make them anymore. AGP has hit its limit. If you want a machine that will stick around for another 5 years - you need PCI-E. Ok you'd need a new card too, but you can get one for about $40.

[Lucile Davis]

Excellent value for the buck, there. Can you recommend a parts source?

As an aside, having recently lost all my PhotoShop customizations (under Prorams-PS-plugins and presets) in a needed XP "Restore", sure wish you could find some way to save yours.

[Littlecoo]

When I start afresh I just reinstall everything...yeah, it's time consuming but most painless option in the long run and gives me the opportunity to do some serious culling I have two hard drives which makes life so much easier, so the second drive is where I backup all my files(and photoshop scratch and plugins) so my primary (boot) drive mostly has all my installed programs on it so it is not so much a hassle or anxiety to reformat the entire drive. As for agp graphics, yeah they are on the way out especially for gaming and 3d animation/graphics, but if you don't dabble in that sort of thing the later agp cards will be supported for a while yet and if it does what you want it to do then it's all good

[Kraellin]

thanks guys, but at the moment, all is moot. seems the motherboard has no carraige for the heatsink/fan arrangement over the cpu. the cpu socket is there and fine, but the plastic carriaige that holds the heat sink is missing. so, no way to lock down the heatsink/fan. always fun to find this out when the last thing you do in the assembly is the heatsink/fan. i've got all the other basics in place and just now found this out.

i think i'm going to go back to my old sig, 'I hate Windows'.

craig

[Cassidy]

Craig, as you have a full backup of the system on another hard drive, you should boot to your Windows CD and it should start the installation processs. Just after the licence agreement part, it should look for an existing installation of Windows and offer you the option of either repair or upgrade. This usually will repair your Windows to be compatible with the new hardware and your existing files and programs should remain in tact. If it does not find an existing installation of Windows to repair/upgrade, do not proceed.

If it cannot find a hard drive at all then you most likely will have to make the driver disk from the motherboard cd and use the f6 option when windows starts its loading process from the cd (it does prompt for this across the bottom of the screen).

[Kraellin]

well, i had to wait till noon for the computer store to open today, sunday and all, but took the entire system back to the store and swapped out the errant motherboard for new, more expensive pci-e board (all nancyj's doing ). that meant stripping everything i had already installed and the board and putting in the new one and setting it all back up again, including my old c: drive with the oem windows on it.

got that all set up and the guys had a testing station there where i could hook up a mouse, keyboard and montitor to test the new rig. no video signal from the pci card (pci, not pci-e... this was my old card). we fooled around with that and finally determined the card was blown. so, i broke down and bought a cheap, $69.00 pci-e card. ok, now we got a video signal.

so, time to test the old harddrive and see if by some longshot that would boot. no signal. bios couldnt see it, even with manual setup. about this time i began wondering if my entire system had had some sort of massive burnout. luckily, the store guys were smarter than me and by changing ribbons and removing ribbons, the drive was finally seen by bios.

ok, getting there, so let's see if the longshot can happen and that maybe, just maybe, windows will actually boot up from my old system. now, this is where things got interesting and surprising. windows began to boot. naturally, since i'd crashed the system so many times, it wanted to do a chkdisk. ok, i let that run and it basically ran through all that and then rebooted itself, which seemed odd. but finally, windows came up to the windows activation screen wanting to know if i wanted to activate now or later. i said later and the system reboot itself again. lol. but it did come up to the activation thing again.

ok, now here, through a bit of trickery the store guy knew, we actually got windows to fully boot up and lo and behold, there was my desktop with all my icons and the whole shebang! ok, i was now pretty impressed. meanwhile, popups for installing devices and drivers are coming up like crazy, most of which werent even attached to the system currently.

well, i'd now been in the store for about 3 1/2 to 4 hours and it was near closing time. so, i shut things down, packed them all up and brought them home. i'm still on the backup machine writing this. there is a ton of stuff i'll still have to do to get the main system back up and functioning fully, but i'm rather amazed they could save that oem on the new hardware!

oh yea, i also had to buy a new keyboard at the store to get the system working there. all they had on the test station was one that used an usb board and mine was set up on ps2. so, $10.50 for a new, cheap board.

so, i've completely blown my original budget of $300. the upgraded board added another $30, the new pci-e card=$70 and a new keyboard for $10.50, plus the fact that i was already over budget by $58. but for what, $470 or so, i've got a new 64 bit mobo, cpu, case, power supply and pci-e card. i'd say that's still a pretty good bang for the buck. and, i saved my old system drives! not bad

so, thanks for the help and for putting up my problems i'll probably burn the whole thing out finishing all the setup i've got to do yet.. lol. shld have bought a mac

craig

[NancyJ]

You may be over budget now but it looks like you're set for a fair few years of upgrades there.

[Gary Richardson]

Sounds like you had a lot of fun (and that you've got a good computer store), hope you don't have any more problems getting it fully rigged.

Like Nancy said, you may have spent a bit more than you'd budgeted for, but you've got a box that should last you a while.

Now, hows your monitor looking?

[Kraellin]

hehe, the monitor is fine.

but, am having problems getting it fully rigged. at first i had a hard time just getting it see two drives in bios. finally got past that but it's still very dodgy. may yet have to go with a full, new install of windows. whatever the guys did at the store to keep the old oem version going, it seems to be affecting putting stuff back on the system, like drives and printers and other devices. so, i'm not out of the woods yet. it boots up ok and i've even got the new vid card drivers installed and that part was mostly ok and i've got one harddrive and one dvd burner running, but when i put a 2nd harddrive back on it goes through all the bootup, gets to the desktop, loads a few things but no start button or task bar comes up and then it blue screens and crashes.

in fact, even before putting the 2nd drive on it would blue screen about 2 out of 3 times. and it doesnt seem to like cable select. i had to go back to master/slave on the drives to get just the one harddrive and dvd burner up and running.

so, in the long run i may be better off just partitioning the current c: drive into 2 partitions and making one clean one for a new install and make that the master boot partition.

the guys at the store told me this would dodgy, trying to save the old oem version, because of the old master boot record stuff and the M$ activation stuff. well, we seem to have gotten past the activation but maybe not the mbr.

i'm gonna keep playing with it for a while, but the frustration level is rising

i do have another thing i havent tried yet too. the motherboard came with a cd of drivers and utilities. might be something there that needs installing since this is a different chipset from the last machine.

i did get a nice performance boost when i removed the old ATI drivers. seems that was conflicting a bit and slowing things down.

so, have made a little progress but keep hitting installation bugs on putting back the old devices.

i hate windows.

craig

[Racc Iria]

Craig...

I hate to say this, but the path you're on is a blue one. A very blue one, indeed. Hardware wise, anyway. Trust me. I know... I've been there.

You should bite the bullet and go with a fresh install of the OS on a nice new formatted partition. Otherwise, all those hardware installation issues you're having will continue... along with those blue screens of death (BSOD).

Here's why... When Windows (NT or later) is installed on a machine it examines all the attached hardware, customizes itself, and creates what's call a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). A good analogy might be that the HAL is to the OS what the BIOS is to the motherboard. Without getting into a lot of detail, it tells windows how to talk to and interpret drivers for all your hardware... everything from your ram, hard drives, video card, peripherals, to your CPU. Everything. And you can't see or control it.

Your current HAL was created for your old e-machine. Forcing Windows to use an old HAL with almost all new hardware (only your drives and the ram are the same, right?) is just asking for problems. Just look at all the BSODs and BIOS issues you're having. Even if you install new drivers for your hardware, Windows may be interpreting/applying them to the old hardware that it thinks is still there. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does but is unstable or has performance issues. A very common result is the BSOD.

A BSOD in later versions of windows (again NT or better) is almost always the result of a hardware driver failure/incompatibility. This is not the foundation you want to build a new system on. Think how difficult it will be to trouble shoot later. Plus, with a fresh install you won't have all that "bit rot" bogging down your system from the start.

A fresh install is a pain, I know, but you will be much happier after it's done and your system is stable and predictable and running as fast and smooth as it can.

--Racc

[lkroll]

I've been a Langalist subscriber for some time (several years now). Fred recently had an article from information week concerning rebuilding the HAL (since you have an eMACHINE, you may not be able to do so since you don't have or don't have access to an XP install disk; for those who do, check the attached link). I've actually saved a few customers using this technique (much faster and better then Repair if it works).

http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=185301251

[Kraellin]

boy, not my day. just wrote a whole long message and then wiped it out.

ok, looks like you're right, racc. the more i add and fool with this, the worse it gets. so, what are my options? i have 3 gigs of free space on c: that i could convert to a new partition and install my retail version of windows on that.

the windows cd tells me that it wont troubleshoot my current version because it's a later version than what's on the cd. current version has service pack 1 and updates and so on. it also tells me that it's willing to wipe out the current version and install the one from the cd but that i'll lose all settings like for i.e., email, modem settings and so on.

i do have the current c: drive backed up on an external harddrive using norton ghost. so, not sure, but cant i get back some of those old settings from that without just trying to run the whole back up? can you pull individual stuff from those backups without running the restoring the whole backup?

and, even though i'm quite a bit over budget on all this, i could get a new harddrive and install the new windows on that and set up the old one as a slave drive and pull stuff from that back to the fresh install.

and where the heck is fdisk these days? is it even used any more? if i do the wipe windows with the new windows option, is that going to do a full re-format of c:? i really dont want that if that's the case. or will it just wipe old windows and install new windows?

and trust me, i've thought about taking the whole thing back to the store and just buying a dell. they do sell them there. but i also dont like oem versions for the hassle if windows breaks somewhere down the road.

since i only do this about every 3 to 5 years and since the technology always outpaces me and since i'm just getting tired of fooling with this and not being able to do my retouching and so on, i'm quite open to best suggestions here.

so, i want to avoid a full re-format of c:. i do want a clean install of windows. ok, i'm sorta talking myself into going out for a new harddrive here. a nice, new, 200 gig drive actually sounds kinda nice at this point. lol. the budget is going to hell.

oh, and what about sata drives? this machine has, i think, 4 sata ports. would i be smarter buying a sata drive as the new c: drive or shld i stick to ide ports for now? i've never had a sata so i know next to nothing about them. and no, i'm not really interested in RAID.

lol. this needs to all go away now so i can get back to what i enjoy doing

craig

[Xaran]

Been there...

A lot of the settings for email etc are in the documents and setting folder you can copy this and reinstate it after you reinstall the OS.

I installed to a different directory name and kept the old one for a while until I had everything working again. The default is c:\Windows but if you have 2 drives there is no reason you can't install on a different one.

Christine

[Racc Iria]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

i do have the current c: drive backed up on an external harddrive using norton ghost. so, not sure, but cant i get back some of those old settings from that without just trying to run the whole back up? can you pull individual stuff from those backups without running the restoring the whole backup?

Depends on your backup software. But, usually there is a way to do that.

Originally Posted by Kraellin

and, even though i'm quite a bit over budget on all this, i could get a new harddrive and install the new windows on that and set up the old one as a slave drive and pull stuff from that back to the fresh install.

This is what I've always done. It makes retrieving any old files pretty painless. Then once you've gotten everything off of it, you can remove the old drive if you find it's slowing your system down. If you do get a new HD and are going to connect the old one as a second drive, make sure to connect them to different IDE or SATA chains.

Originally Posted by Kraellin

and where the heck is fdisk these days? is it even used any more? if i do the wipe windows with the new windows option, is that going to do a full re-format of c:? i really dont want that if that's the case. or will it just wipe old windows and install new windows?.

Fdisk is still in there... somewhere. If you do a fresh install and don't override or repair a previous installation you will be presented with the chance to create and format partitions if the drive is blank or repartition the drive if it's not. Once you select a partition to install Windows on, that partition will be formatted. Any other partitions should be left alone. Even if you install to a completely blank drive that's never been used and create multiple partitions on it, the Windows installation will only format the partition where you're putting Windows. You'll then have to go into the disk management tool and format the other partitions.

In my systems I like to have at least three physical drives and at least three logical drives. How they are divided depends on how much storage there is. But, generallly the first drive/partition (C is for the OS only and I usually make it around 10-20 Gb. If I have plenty of HD space left on that physical drive then a partition completely devoted to page files, swap files,the documents and settings folders, and things like Photoshop's temp files is a very good idea. The second physical drive is where ALL applications are installed. The third drive is purely for storage of data and created files.

This provides a very modular way to recover from disaster. All you need to back up is the storage drive and the Documents and settings folders. If the OS or its drive dies, you know it's okay to blow out that partition or replace the drive and start fresh. Sure, you'll have to reinstall the applications and rebuild the registry, but you can usually install the applications over top of themselves. That way, any customizations (like photoshop styles, plugins, etc.) are not lost. If the applications drive dies, you still have the OS and your data. If your storage drive dies, you should have your backup.

Originally Posted by Kraellin

oh, and what about sata drives? this machine has, i think, 4 sata ports. would i be smarter buying a sata drive as the new c: drive or shld i stick to ide ports for now?

If you're buying a new drive(s) go with SATA. They are the future. IDE is a fading technology. Kind of like PCI, AGP, and anyone remember ISA? Besides... smaller cables, better air flow for cooling.

Originally Posted by Kraellin

and no, i'm not really interested in RAID.

Why not (other than cost)? I've been using RAID 5 setups for almost a decade now and have never lost any data to drive failure.

--Racc

[Kraellin]

racc,

thank you for all that!

i've pretty much decided it's going to be a new harddrive. i'm taking the day off from work to get this thing going. so, another trip to the store and more $$. oh well, i never liked budgets anyways.

i like how you set things up on your system and have recently been contemplating something similar. seems the best format is o/s, applications, and data, all on separate partitions. i hadnt thought about the swap file option, though. a whole partition for that? seems overly large to me, but ok. and you can put the docs and settings folder separate from the rest of a windows install? i didnt know that and that would be helpful, since some software manufacturers seem to like to store things there. and what's the difference between a page file and a swap file? (i can look that up later).

ok, i've never used SATA but my limited understanding is that it's a bit more like scsi; more versatile and less restricting and a bit faster. but does it work like ide in that you can put two devices on the same port or does it work like scsi in that you can chain the drives or what? and all my current devices are ide, so if i go sata as the new drive, do i just set up the old ones under ide and the system is going to recognize that i've got two different types? dont worry too much about this part. i'm going to the store shortly and will ask the guys there about all this. and as for RAID, i guess my biggest objection is, i dont know a thing about it except back when i was trying to keep up with things, RAID meant dual drives in a parallel hookup for faster data transfers and it seemed dicey to me. if one drive went down, then it would be like both did. so, i put it in the back of my mind, 'not interested in RAID'. but, that was back where there was only one RAID and about all i know now is that there are quite a few. i'll ask the guys at the store about this too, but throw anything at me here on this, particularly since you've got experience with it.

i do appreciate all the responses and help. i always go a bit crazy on this stuff and i'm pretty adamant about trying to keep my old files and data so i appreciate all the advices here. hopefully, by the end of the day, i'll be back on the new system, at least in bare bones mode

craig

[Racc Iria]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

racc, thank you for all that!

No problem. My pleasure.

i like how you set things up on your system and have recently been contemplating something similar. seems the best format is o/s, applications, and data, all on separate partitions. i hadnt thought about the swap file option, though. a whole partition for that? seems overly large to me, but ok.
and you can put the docs and settings folder separate from the rest of a windows install? i didnt know that and that would be helpful, since some software manufacturers seem to like to store things there. and what's the difference between a page file and a swap file? (i can look that up later).

Well, the OS drive is usually smaller to begin with. Don't need a 200 gig drive for it... not until Vista gets here, anyway. So, the partition for the page file, etc. doesn't have to be more than a few gigs really, but I like even numbers and usually allow around 10 for it. A swap file and a page file are the same thing. The page file is the OS's swap file, so I guess they like to have a special name for it. Also on that partition I tend to store things like installers and current drivers that have been downloaded, etc.

ok, i've never used SATA but my limited understanding is that it's a bit more like scsi; more versatile and less restricting and a bit faster. but does it work like ide in that you can put two devices on the same port or does it work like scsi in that you can chain the drives or what? and all my current devices are ide, so if i go sata as the new drive, do i just set up the old ones under ide and the system is going to recognize that i've got two different types? dont worry too much about this part. i'm going to the store shortly and will ask the guys there about all this.

You mentioned that your motherboard had 4 SATA ports on it. I've only recently started buying SATA drives myself. But, my understanding is that each SATA drive plugs into one port. You can get port multipliers that allow each port to control up to 15 drives, but that's usually overkill for home machines.

If your motherboard has both SATA and IDE ports then you can connect both types of drives. If your board doesn't have one type of port or the other, you can get inexpensive add-on cards to give you those ports.

back when i was trying to keep up with things, RAID meant dual drives in a parallel hookup for faster data transfers and it seemed dicey to me. if one drive went down, then it would be like both did. so, i put it in the back of my mind, 'not interested in RAID'. but, that was back where there was only one RAID and about all i know now is that there are quite a few. i'll ask the guys at the store about this too, but throw anything at me here on this, particularly since you've got experience with it.

Sure. RAID 0 mean striping two drives together to make it act as a single drive. This makes reading faster, but writing a little slower. RAID 1 is two drives, but the second drive is a mirror of the first. RAID 3 is striping multiple disks together. RAID 4 stipes together multiple drives but has a dedicated parity drive. If the parity drive fails, you're in trouble. RAID 5 is the way to go. In RAID 5 multiple disks are striped together, but the parity is spread out over all the drives. For example... In a system with 4 drives in a RAID 5 configuration you get the storage space of three drives, the storage space of the fourth drive is used for the parity information. That's the matematical algorithm that keeps all your data intact. However, since all this information is spread across all the drives, any one of the drives can fail without loss of data or parity. Just replace the failed drive and let the computer rebuild the array. The more extra drives you add, the more simultaneaous drive failures you can have without any data loss. So, if you used 5 drives... 3 storage and 2 parity... any two of the drives can fail at the same time while you can still keep working without losing any data.

We use this where I work. I create animation and motion graphics for TV, so I have quite large video type files to deal with. Constantly backing up a terrabyte or two is not practical. RAID 5 lets us not worry about it.

It's a little overkill for home systems, though. But if you work from home or something, it's probably worth the investment.


--Racc

[Kraellin]

well, the nightmare continues. i bought a new 250 gig sata II drive. i get it home, put it on the machine and the machine doesnt see it, except it does sort of. it doesnt see it well enough that bios can see it but it does see it well enough that the install disk of windows does. but at first i dont notice this. all i see is that windows setup seems to be loading ok. i get to the part where it wants an old version of windows to verify that i have a legitimate system (yes, seems all i have is an xp UPGRADE disk, not the full version). anyways, i put an old windows disk in there and it verfifies it ok.

next, it wants to format and install. but, i dont notice that it's already formatted and partitioned, one big 238 gig c: partition. seems this is what is called an 'open box' drive, meaning, someone had already formatted and partitioned the drive and brought it back to the store and they just restock it and sell it at a discount. i had wondered why i got it so cheaply. anyways, you cant full format over an already formatted drive, at least not in windows setup. so that sits there for a half an hour trying to format and not getting past 0%. cute. i call the store service guy and we finally figure out it's already formatted as one big partition. so, he says just hit the 'D' key and delete that one and you can then put on more partitions and format each of those. and that's what i wanted, smaller partitions. so, i hit D and it wipes the old partition.

now, somewhere in all this mess the store guy also has me disable RAID in bios and that's how the system finally could see the new drive.

so, now i tell it to create new partitions. it does this nicely. i set up one as 10 gigs, the c: drive, one at 50 and split the remaining space into 2 more. so, 4 partitions.

ok, windows setup is fine with that. so, i then go to format the new raw c: drive. same thing happens again; it wont go past 0% complete. what the freak?

call the store guy again and while i'm talking to him i hit 'quick format' and it starts to format and then starts to install the new windows. cool. ok, hang up. windows continues to load stuff up and gets down to 'installing new start menu programs' or something like that and the progress bar moves slowly to the right and the 'time left' is counting down nicely i'm thinking, 'finally!'. hah!

it wont move the countdown past 19 minutes remaining. this goes on for well over 30 minutes so i start playing with the mouse for some stupid reason and suddenly everything locks up. cant move the mouse and some other things like the advertisement window quits refreshing and i know the thing has locked up.

yeah, call the store guy again! while talking to him i get that i need to reboot the system and maybe it'll just start up again where it left off, at least, that's what he thinks. bah! i hit the reset button and this time i cant see the sata drive in the drive detection lines but it keeps going anyways and up comes windows setup from the windows cd, only, it's starting all over again! good lord.

the store guy doesnt understand this and i'm already way past not understanding. so, i F3 out of setup and the machine restarts again, only this time i can see the sata drive again but as soon as it comes to the boot from cd i get a blue screen of death saying something about an 'unmountable drive'.

now, understand here, i'm a pretty easy going guy, but at this point i'm looking for dynamite or a shotgun...either will do.

so, i call the store guy again. i'm sure he hates the sound of my voice by now and frankly, i didnt much care at this point, though i do know it's not his fault. so, he says 'well, i cant tell over the phone. bring it in and we'll run a diagnostic on it.'. ok, so i once again make the 60 mile trek to the store but it's getting near quitting time for the service guy.

i'm now talking to one of the salesman out front and he says sure, we can look at it, just sign this paper for a diagnostic....$35. remember now, they sold me the motherboard, the case, the power supply, the keyboard, the cpu and the sata drive. the ONLY thing that is on this machine at this point is my mouse and one stick of ram and they want ME to pay for a diagnostic! i'm now very near full-blown pissed! but, i as calmly as possible explain to him 'it YOUR parts! you want ME to PAY to diagnose the parts you just sold me over the last 4 days?!?! he finally says, 'ok, if it turns out in the diagnostic that it's any of our parts i'll waive the fee'. gee, how nice. i'm now threatening to return the entire system for a refund and he threatens 'restocking fee of 15%'.

after a bit more 'discussion' i finally let him take the machine, even though this is going to be another overnight thing and there's no chance to get the system checked today. and that's where we left it.

now, why do i feel like i was just raped, run over the coals and had a big tattoo placed on me somewhere that says 'mark' ?

ok, in all fairness to them, it could still turn out to be user error. i know this. i know i dont do this enough to really, truly know everything i probably need to know to build a new system. these things are getting more and more complex and i'm getting less and less complex as i get older.

meanwhile, i'm without a decent system for yet another day, feel like i'm hungover and if i had a 6 pack in the house it would probably be gone by now.

if i wasnt so upset and frustrated this would make a great 'windows' story to circulate around the net and poke fun at microsoft about. as it is.... I HATE WINDOWS!

i just cant wait to hear what they're going to tell me tomorrow.

craig

[Cameraken]

Craig.

It’s nice to see you have not lost your sense of humor (yet)

This appears to be quite a common problem. Did the drive come with a floppy install disk? If so then this may help

http://richandstephsipe.com/2005/05/...n-sata-ii.html

Ken.

[Kraellin]

ken, that definitely looks like the culprit. i believe the motherboard on that page is the one i have. and i know it was a samsung sata II drive. and all that looks very, very familiar. i'll pass that on to the tech guys at the store. i did finally figure out the part about disabling all the raid stuff, but never figured out the drivers part.

thank you!

craig

[Racc Iria]

It also seems to me if the drive had been opened, formatted, and then returned that there may have been something wrong with it in the first place.

I agree with you, Craig. You should not have to pay for the diagnostic. They sold it to you. They should make sure it works.

Hang in there.

--Racc