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HELP! i have a computer problem

P

pennylane

Diamond Member
my specs:
athlon xp 1800 w/ stock cooling
shuttle kt333 mobo (ak31gt2? i'm not sure the exact name i'm not at my computer)
sparkle 350 watt psu
30 GB ibm gxp 60 (i've had it since march with no problems yet)
creative geforce2gts (no problems before)
turtle beach santa cruz


i should admit it's pretty much my fault. i finished installing my new computer (i actually did it myself) for the first time around beginning of julyish and i haven't had any problems with it. but... i forgot to screw in a screw that kept the hard drive/floppy drive bays in place... i don't know if all cases have it but it's like a little cage that houses the floppy/hard drives. it held together for awhile, pretty much cuz i didn't put a floppy disk inside my comp... but a week ago, i did. and the cage thing fell down. i didn't have a chance to hook it back up right away, so i left it. it worked okay for awhile, but then i noticed i had to restart it after i turned it on to get into windows. then on saturday i finally put it back in and put the screw in.

before this incident, i had 0 problems with my comp. it did not freeze once. but now, i sometimes have to restart my comp several times before boot up to get windows to start. occasionally windows starts but it freezes a minute or so after log-on. only once did it freeze after being on for several hours. it seems that if i get past the initially freezing the computer is fine, but it's a pain. i'm not sure what happened. if a cable is loose, or worse, hardware was damaged when the cage (with hard drive/floppy drive) fell. i don't think it landed on anything... except possibly the edge of the motherboard, so i'm not quite sure if something happened. another possibility is that i damaged it with static electricity... i think i grounded myself before i touched anything, but i'm not sure.

i'm not sure if this is a hardware problem... because it works okay most of the time. but then, i haven't installed new software or anything. and i didn't have problems until it fell. i plan on making sure all the wires are snugly fit. and reformatting eventually if i still have problems. do you have any ideas?


i also have another question. my brother has a spare 20 gig hard drive... i wouldn't mind using it for audio media storage.... but i recently found it with a magnet stuck to it =/. will it still be okay? is it safe to try putting it in my comp to see if it works... or could that damage my motherboard? thank you
 
Ouch, it sounds like the fall damaged the hard drive itself. It will probably fail at some point, so I'd suggest backing up all the data and replacing it ASAP.

Originally posted by: heyzeus

i also have another question. my brother has a spare 20 gig hard drive... i wouldn't mind using it for audio media storage.... but i recently found it with a magnet stuck to it =/. will it still be okay? is it safe to try putting it in my comp to see if it works... or could that damage my motherboard? thank you
Click to expand...

It can't hurt your motherboard, chances are the drive is fine. It's possible that the magnet erased some of the low level information the BIOS uses to access the drive, but that's unlikely and there's no harm in trying.

If that 20 GB drive works fine then I'd suggest you use a program like Norton Ghost to copy the contents of the old drive to the new 20 GB drive. That way you can toss the old drive and your data will be safe.
 
more bad news for me 🙁.

i switched hard drives. switched to the 20 gig i had before. for the first couple days, it worked fine. but starting last night, i started having the same problems i had with the old hard drive: random lockups during boot-up, first few minutes in windows.

i'm not so sure what's wrong anymore. i'm guessing the motherboard might have been damaged when the cage that held the hard drive/floppy drive fell. but, it could only have touched one end of the motherboard, and it didn't look like it did, though it's possible. are there any other possibilities?
will i have to get a new motherboard?
 
I highly doubt static electricity is to blame. It is very rare for hardware to be damage by static electricity unless you do something like set it on top of a carpet. More likely, a few sectors on your harddisk were damage. I would suggest doing a surface scan to make sure there are no bad sectors.
 
i've tried that... and i have the same problems after replacing hard drives, so i doubt the hard drive is the problem.
 
okay... i replaced my 30gig ibm with a 20 gig... and for a couple days, i had no problems, then... all of a sudden i had the same problems i was experiencing with my 30 gig (mentioned in the initial post). now, all of a sudden, i have no more problems with my 20 gig. what's going on with my comp?
 
Okay here something obvious but often over looked, did you replace the IDE cable? ATA66 cables are more fragile than the old ATA33 cables. It could be the fall broke one of the ground wires and your getting crosstalk on the cable.
 
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