I recently got a laptop from my aunt. It's a Compaq Presario 1700, and as much as I hate Compaq, if it does the job I'm not complaining. It's running WinXP, but it has a lot of crap so I went to reformat/reinstall Windows.
Except, it will boot from the Windows CD, but as soon as the blue Setup window appears, it will suddenly lose power and I have to restart. So I tried booting from a floppy, and went to fdisk the drive (it's got two partitions for some lame reason). I could view the partitions, but as soon as I tried to delete a partition it again lost power for no reason. By this point I'd installed Aida32 to see what hardware it had and get the Windows CD key for reinstallation, so I decided to run the hard drive tests. About 20% into the drive, the read speed drops to 0.23 MB/s, and stays there. However, the computer does not lose power as it did previously. I do the quick linear read, random read, and so on, and sure enough I see a bunch of huge dips which would seem to indicate something is wrong with the drive. But it's not losing power!
Finally, I download the drive fitness test boot floppy, and try that. It boots from the floppy, but loses power as soon as it tries to do anything with the hard drive.
This is wierd. Windows is pretty stable, but every so often it will lose power for no reason. I figured it did that every time it tried to read a bad section of the drive, but the read tests don't make it fail at all. Why does it lose power like this?
Except, it will boot from the Windows CD, but as soon as the blue Setup window appears, it will suddenly lose power and I have to restart. So I tried booting from a floppy, and went to fdisk the drive (it's got two partitions for some lame reason). I could view the partitions, but as soon as I tried to delete a partition it again lost power for no reason. By this point I'd installed Aida32 to see what hardware it had and get the Windows CD key for reinstallation, so I decided to run the hard drive tests. About 20% into the drive, the read speed drops to 0.23 MB/s, and stays there. However, the computer does not lose power as it did previously. I do the quick linear read, random read, and so on, and sure enough I see a bunch of huge dips which would seem to indicate something is wrong with the drive. But it's not losing power!
Finally, I download the drive fitness test boot floppy, and try that. It boots from the floppy, but loses power as soon as it tries to do anything with the hard drive.
This is wierd. Windows is pretty stable, but every so often it will lose power for no reason. I figured it did that every time it tried to read a bad section of the drive, but the read tests don't make it fail at all. Why does it lose power like this?