Recent content by bruincal

Hi, I have an Dell Inspiron 8500. One day, the bottom of the LCD starting flickering and lines starting appearing. Three hours later, the screen turns into this: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~frances/laptop/index.html There's some faint images on certain screens, but for the most part...

I have a 40GB Western Digital 7200rpm 2mb cache hard drive. Its is about 3 months old. This drive was a RMA replacement drive from WD. However, recently, its been acting strange. When I use it for long periods of time, the drive powers off and back on by itself. For example, if I'm playing...

I have really big hands (measuring 8.25 inches from base of palm to tip of middle finger), and I've been using the usual IntelliMouse / Logitech Optical mice. However, because the mice are too small for me, I have to scrunch up my fingers. The result has been a constant pain and aching in my...

oh yeah, I have my 40GB configured as Master and 100GB configured as Slave. Windows XP sits on the 40GB and the page file sits on the 100GB. Thanks! =)

I am using Windows XP Pro (SP1 and all patches and all drivers updated) and I replaced my faulty 40GB Western Digital hard drive with another 40GB Western Digital drive. The drive is identical in all specs, but of course, manufactered on an earlier date. I never had any shutdown problems with...

Sometimes failing drives will exhibit those problems. Have you tried using PowerMax from www.maxtor.com ? It creates a bootable floppy with diagnostic utlities. It will also read the SMART feature on the drive and tell you if the drive is failing and if everything is working properly. It can...

Oh yeah, I forgot - my system specs and OS: Windows XP Professional, SP1 and all patches Pentium 4 2.0 GHz Intel 850MV motherboard 256 MB RDRAM 40 GB HDD 100 GB HDD DVD/CDRW USB2.0/FireWire Thanks!

Hi, I need to backup my 40GB drive. Its filled to capacity, totalling about 37GB of data on a single bootable NTFS partition. I need to back it up onto a USB2.0 hard drive that is formatted FAT32. The thing is, I will not be using this backup to restore the image later. I will only be...

Oh whoops, sorry about that ... I read your post a little too fast =P Did you deleting all partitions in PartitionMagic, and then recreating a new primary partition that spans the entire drive?

for security reasons, new hard drives do not automatically show up in windows xp. you have to go to Control Panel, Adminitrative Tools, Computer Management, choose Disk Management on the left pane, right click the drive, and choose something like Make Partition Active .. or something like that ...

I took the drive out, plugged it into a spare power supply and turned it on. ... Then I got my MD recorder and placed the mic near the drive as it was running by itself. This is what it sounds like: http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~bruincal/wddrive.mp3 (its a 400KB mp3 file)

Thanks for the reply! My computer is a Gateway 700X, and the mounting brackets are those ones that slide the drive in ... no screws at all. They produce noise all the time ... its a whiny, high-pitched noise. I think it may be the 40GB drive only ... When I turn my computer on, I can hear the...

Or your CD writer may have failed and not be able to burn CDRW's anymore ... that's one of the many possibilities ... This happened to one of my older CD-Writers. It can burn CD-R's fine, but fails to recognize or burn CD-RW's (I tried the drive in another computer, and same thing).

I bought two hard drives for my computer about a year ago. One was a 40 GB, 2MB cache, 7200rpm Western Digital and the other was a 100 GB, 2MB cache, 7200 rpm Western Digital. For the past few months, they have been getting extremely loud. When I first installed them, I noticed how quiet they...

yup, bolomite has a good question .. you might be exceeding the maximum power output by your power supply