Please help me diagnose what's bad in my system

[J3anyus]

Okay, my new super-powerful machine is having problems. Lots of them. It's in my System Rigs profile, the machine's name is Magus, but here's a quick rundown of the specs:

Intel 865PE Reference Board
2.8GHz P4c, 800MHz FSB
768MB Crucial DDR400
Some generic power supply (note: this is probably the problem in my machine)
128MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
60GB WD @ 5400 RPMs
80GB Maxtor @ 7200 RPMs
Windows XP Pro
Various other things.

So, here's what's happening. Ever since I got the damn machine, every week or two, Windows has just died. The first time, all my file associations got screwed up, and clicking on almost any file would cause explorer.exe to crash. I re-installed, and things were fine. About 2 more weeks go by, and I start getting blue screens. I looked them up, and saw that they were related to problems within NTFS filesystems. I ran chkdsk on my C: partition, and sure enough, it found errors. I ran Western Digital's HD diagnostics, and it said the drive was fine. I ignored the errors since WD's tools said the drive was good, formatted, and re-installed Windows. Things worked again for about a week, and now here I am. Windows won't boot. It gets to the Welcome screen, says "starting up system", and hangs there. I've let it sit for an hour or so, and it never goes anywhere. I can move the mouse around and such, but can't really do much else.

At this point, I started thinking back to the chkdsk problems I was having earlier. I decided I might as well boot into the recovery console and run chkdsk on my C: partition. Just like last time, chkdsk found unrecoverable errors. I decided to try out a trick I've learned over the years. When a partition has problems, ghost it over to another drive, format the partition on the original drive, then ghost it back. Surprisingly, I've seen this fix dozens of machines. I don't know what Ghost does to make things work, but it's like magic. I did this on my secondary machine. Before moving the drive back to the main machine, I ran chkdsk on it when it was slaved to my secondary machine, and found no errors. I figured things would be good.

I moved the drive back to my main machine, and got the same problem as before: it hung at the Welcome screen. I booted into the XP recovery console, ran chkdsk, got more errors. At this point, I powered down the machine and switched the IDE cable with a known-good cable. Booted back into the recovery console, ran chkdsk, got errors. I got curious at this point, since I hadn't had errors on the drive when it was attached to a different machine. I decided to try running chkdsk on the slave drive attached to my main machine. Errors. I ran chkdsk on the secondary partition of my main drive. Errors.

I'm going to borrow a spare power supply from a friend on Monday and give that a shot, and hopefully that will fix it. However, my question is, if the power supply doesn't fix it, what is likely to be the problem? The only thing I could think of was possibly the IDE controller on the motherboard is faulty.

Any help you could give me would be very much appreciated, as this problem has me extremely frustrated.

Short version: Windows kept dying on machine, chkdsk showed errors on drives. When drives are hooked up to another machine, chkdsk says they're fine. Tried changing IDE cables, didn't help.

Thanks!

- Jacob

Edit: Forgot to mention, it's Memtested overnight with Memtest86, running all tests with 13 passes, no errors, so the memory isn't the problem.

 

[TheInvincibleMustard]

Are you running chkdsk or scandisk ... unless you're using an old version of DOS/Windows, you should be running scandisk.

With that out of the way, I doubt that the power supply is the problem. This just doesn't have the "ring" of a PSU problem, but trying a new one certainly doesn't hurt. Your second hunch sounds more likely (problems with IDE controller on mobo), but I would first try running a surface scan through scandisk on the entire drive to see if there is any problems with it that way.

 

[J3anyus]

Originally posted by: TheInvincibleMustard
Are you running chkdsk or scandisk ... unless you're using an old version of DOS/Windows, you should be running scandisk.

With that out of the way, I doubt that the power supply is the problem. This just doesn't have the "ring" of a PSU problem, but trying a new one certainly doesn't hurt. Your second hunch sounds more likely (problems with IDE controller on mobo), but I would first try running a surface scan through scandisk on the entire drive to see if there is any problems with it that way.

I think you've got your stuff backwards. Scandisk = Win9X/DOS, chkdsk = WinNT/2K/XP. I'm running chkdsk.

Edit: And yeah, I agree about the power supply thing. I've worked on a good thousand computers in my time (I'm a computer tech), and it just doesn't feel like a power supply problem to me. Still, it's the best place to start.

 

[butch84]

what is your memory configuration? Im assuming you are using two 256mb chips, and two 128mb chips in the proper slots to make 768mb? Just in case, i wanted to point this out, cause if you werent using identical memory in pairs, that could give you some problems

good luck
butch

 

[TheInvincibleMustard]

Originally posted by: J3anyus

Originally posted by: TheInvincibleMustard
Are you running chkdsk or scandisk ... unless you're using an old version of DOS/Windows, you should be running scandisk.

With that out of the way, I doubt that the power supply is the problem. This just doesn't have the "ring" of a PSU problem, but trying a new one certainly doesn't hurt. Your second hunch sounds more likely (problems with IDE controller on mobo), but I would first try running a surface scan through scandisk on the entire drive to see if there is any problems with it that way.

I think you've got your stuff backwards. Scandisk = Win9X/DOS, chkdsk = WinNT/2K/XP. I'm running chkdsk.

Edit: And yeah, I agree about the power supply thing. I've worked on a good thousand computers in my time (I'm a computer tech), and it just doesn't feel like a power supply problem to me. Still, it's the best place to start.

Heh ... shows what I get for running all my "bad" hard drives through DOS scandisk my bit-bucket Win95 machine ... never noticed that scandisk doesn't exist on XP ...

 

[nick1985]

crucial 3200. what is that crap, like cas8?

 

[WarCon]

Might try a couple new ATA66/100 cables.

How is the power in your house/town? Do you get brown-outs from storms/high power usage (air conditioners)? \

Fluctuating power will affect cheap powersupplies worse than quality ones as the input filtering is generally better in quality supplies. You might try a line conditioner if your power is questionable (I personally think line conditioners should be much more common for overclockers and high end system users anyway). Do yourself a favor and get a quality powersupply, doesn't have to be huge wattage, just a better quality. Failing powersupplies can kill every component they are connected to. I have seen it several times where only the modem survived.

Good luck figuring out your problem.....