Just upgraded my system with the following, and am having some problems.
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550
2x Crucial Ballistix 1GB SDRAM DDR2 1066
Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA
GECUBE Radeon HD 3850
Kept my old case and DVD-R drive. Built Thurs night. Installed windows from my ancient original Home CD from 2001 (slipstreaming or whatever to incorporate SP2 didn't work). Installed drivers etc but did minimal tweaking. Was pissed that I couldn't get the XP SP2 slipstreamed CD to work, cuz original XP wouldn't format the entire 250 GB drive. Later I had Windows performa a quick-format to create the remainder of the HD space as another partition.
Friday and Saturday nights I played WoW with no problems. Sunday I woke up to find the screensaver (the XP picture slideshow one) had crashed; dialog said Windows had experienced an error. When I rebooted, I started seeing this error message:
"scanning bios image on hard drive..." That hung for a long time, so I rebooted. This time it said the same thing, but kept chugging and eventually it booted into Windows.
Thinking there was something wrong with the BIOS, I used the @BIOS thingy that the Gigabyte CD installs. This flashes the BIOS from within Windows, which after some reading apparently is not a good idea?
A couple hours later, and I'm getting the same problem. Crashing screensaver, reboot, scanning bios image on hard drive. Crap! I disable the screensaver - maybe it's doing something weird (?!) - I dunno, several multi-hour play sessions in WoW had uncovered no problems.
Playing WoW Sunday night. It crashes - says some file like data.MPQ is corrupt. I perform the WoW Repair. It is installing one of the patches from the hard drive (already downloaded) and says the patch contains corrupt data. I delete all the previously downloaded patches and about 170 MB into the new download, the patcher says the data it has saved to disk is corrupt. I click the link in the error message, which sends me to a page at Blizzard to troubleshoot, it says to run chkdsk.
Chkdsk runs and says there are errors in the file system, run chkdsk /f. Except Windows won't let me run chkdsk /f, have to do it at bootup. So I do so, it runs for a really long time. Then whatever the results were scroll by so fast I have no idea what it said and Windows boots. So I run chkdsk again to see if everything is ok. Nope, it says there are errors in the file system.
Sorry for the lengthy description, but I'm stumped and at a loss as to what to do. It sounds like there are a couple of different issues, but I was wondering if someone more knowledgeable than I could tell help me with some questions:
1. If the BIOS is bad, would that explain the corrupt hard drive / chkdsk errors?
2. If the hard drive were faulty, would that explain the BIOS problem? (scanning BIOS image on hard drive...)
3. How do I see the results of running chkdsk /f at bootup? is there a log somewhere where I can go see it after it scrolls by at light speed and windows boots?
4. All the sites I read about fixing a bad BIOS flash require a boot floppy. I don't have a floppy drive. Am I screwed? Can you use a boot USB thumb drive (assuming your motherboard boots from USB)?
5. If I need to reformat the drive and reinstall Windows XP, can I use any Windows XP disk as long as I input my key from my original Home CD? ie, can I use the WinXP Pro CD I just bought for my mom's computer (assuming it will have SP2 integrated by default, thus allowing me to use my entire 250 GB drive and sparing me the thousand patch downloads).
6. I installed some anti-spyware software on Sunday morning - AVG anti-spyware, and Spybot S&D. Is it possible one of them corrupted my system?
Thanks for any help. I'm unsure how to proceed! 🙁
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550
2x Crucial Ballistix 1GB SDRAM DDR2 1066
Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA
GECUBE Radeon HD 3850
Kept my old case and DVD-R drive. Built Thurs night. Installed windows from my ancient original Home CD from 2001 (slipstreaming or whatever to incorporate SP2 didn't work). Installed drivers etc but did minimal tweaking. Was pissed that I couldn't get the XP SP2 slipstreamed CD to work, cuz original XP wouldn't format the entire 250 GB drive. Later I had Windows performa a quick-format to create the remainder of the HD space as another partition.
Friday and Saturday nights I played WoW with no problems. Sunday I woke up to find the screensaver (the XP picture slideshow one) had crashed; dialog said Windows had experienced an error. When I rebooted, I started seeing this error message:
"scanning bios image on hard drive..." That hung for a long time, so I rebooted. This time it said the same thing, but kept chugging and eventually it booted into Windows.
Thinking there was something wrong with the BIOS, I used the @BIOS thingy that the Gigabyte CD installs. This flashes the BIOS from within Windows, which after some reading apparently is not a good idea?
A couple hours later, and I'm getting the same problem. Crashing screensaver, reboot, scanning bios image on hard drive. Crap! I disable the screensaver - maybe it's doing something weird (?!) - I dunno, several multi-hour play sessions in WoW had uncovered no problems.
Playing WoW Sunday night. It crashes - says some file like data.MPQ is corrupt. I perform the WoW Repair. It is installing one of the patches from the hard drive (already downloaded) and says the patch contains corrupt data. I delete all the previously downloaded patches and about 170 MB into the new download, the patcher says the data it has saved to disk is corrupt. I click the link in the error message, which sends me to a page at Blizzard to troubleshoot, it says to run chkdsk.
Chkdsk runs and says there are errors in the file system, run chkdsk /f. Except Windows won't let me run chkdsk /f, have to do it at bootup. So I do so, it runs for a really long time. Then whatever the results were scroll by so fast I have no idea what it said and Windows boots. So I run chkdsk again to see if everything is ok. Nope, it says there are errors in the file system.
Sorry for the lengthy description, but I'm stumped and at a loss as to what to do. It sounds like there are a couple of different issues, but I was wondering if someone more knowledgeable than I could tell help me with some questions:
1. If the BIOS is bad, would that explain the corrupt hard drive / chkdsk errors?
2. If the hard drive were faulty, would that explain the BIOS problem? (scanning BIOS image on hard drive...)
3. How do I see the results of running chkdsk /f at bootup? is there a log somewhere where I can go see it after it scrolls by at light speed and windows boots?
4. All the sites I read about fixing a bad BIOS flash require a boot floppy. I don't have a floppy drive. Am I screwed? Can you use a boot USB thumb drive (assuming your motherboard boots from USB)?
5. If I need to reformat the drive and reinstall Windows XP, can I use any Windows XP disk as long as I input my key from my original Home CD? ie, can I use the WinXP Pro CD I just bought for my mom's computer (assuming it will have SP2 integrated by default, thus allowing me to use my entire 250 GB drive and sparing me the thousand patch downloads).
6. I installed some anti-spyware software on Sunday morning - AVG anti-spyware, and Spybot S&D. Is it possible one of them corrupted my system?
Thanks for any help. I'm unsure how to proceed! 🙁
