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Comp doesn't start right! 80gig reads as 30! what's going on???

S

skeeto

Junior Member
HELP GUYS!
I bought a comp, put it together 6 months ago, everything new (450watt case with athlon 1900+, abit raid mobo, crucial ram, radeon 8500, turtlebeach, blah blah) BUT IT NEVER WORKED RIGHT. It'll never start right (I'd have to switch it on and off constantly for it to start from a cold boot) and now, it won't even start at all! Motherboard settings are set to "fail safe" (and it worked happily under that for about a week before it started crashing like a test dummy again). To make matters worse, I bought a Maxtor diamond max 80gigger, and that thing reads as a 31gig in windoze xp (although bios agrees it's still an 80gig). WTF? I've been trying to tough it out for the past six months, being a man and thinking I can do it by myself, but now I must wince in my disability to do it =( HELP ME PLEASE BEFORE I CRUSH SOMETHING!
 
If you can get Windows up and running for a little while, go into Windows Drive Management (I don't know the precise path to it in WinXP, use Windows Help if you need help finding it), and see what Drive Management says about your drive. Perhaps the drive only has one 30Gb partition created and just needs a new partition created to access the other 50Gb.

What brand is your 450W power supply? What brand/model of heatsink/fan are you using? What motherboard model is your ABit? Have you tried a different PSU or any other substitutions in order to troubleshoot? A full listing of all the parts in the system would probably help people try to spot the problem, too. 🙂 Welcome to the Forums 😀
 
haha, thanks for the welcome! I'd have posted everything in super detail if I remembered, but I broght my harddrive over to troubleshoot at my g/f's. Case is enlight, fan is dr. cool (or something like that) and as for the mobo, i really don't remember (I could prolly get it by tonight at the earliest). Boy, I suck, huh?
 
I wonder if your heatsink could just be on backwards, that happens a lot. If you look at the underside, it's got a step cut into one end of the base to provide clearance over the solid-plastic end of the CPU socket... really important to get those to match up.

Also, if your heatsink had a pre-applied square of gummy thermal compound, be aware that those are a one-shot deal, they melt to fit and that's the one shot. If you take off the heatsink afterwards then you want to use some high-quality thermal compound after removing the original gummy pad.
 
Man, thanks a lot for helping me, I don't know what I'd do (except buy a new comp XD). Yea, I bought some arctic heatsink compound for it, guess I'll take off the fan and wipe it off, reapply and switch position. As for the mobo, I believe it's an ABIT KD7A Raid. Thanks again!
 
Can't believe someone hasnt thought of this yet....

All modern hardrives have size clipping jumpers that make the hardrive report itself smaller than it actually is. This is so you can use the drive on old systems with 3rd party drive overlay software.

Check your jumper settings again. Its quire common to set this wrong, they do not always make the settings clear....
 
Thanks for the help guys. Yea, I knew about the size clipping for older os's, but couldn't find the jumpers on the hd. Maybe I can go find a buddy who could find it. wow, life sux. At least I got ya'll =P thanks again!
 
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