"PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT"

[jstultz]

In the past couple days, every once in a while my computer would suddenly become agonizingly slow, and then later work fine again. Yesterday, it started going slow, and then one program froze (Winamp, if it matters), I tried to end task at least 20 times, didn't work, and eventually the entire computer locked up. Had no choice but to cycle the power. Did so, and the PC locked up when it started loading the IDE controller card. Rebooted again, it popped into BIOS and gave a message regarding something about processor speed (can't remember exactly), and that it would boot in safe mode (100mhz bus instead of 133) so the CPU booted at 750mhz instead of 1000. After I did that, it got past the point where it froze earlier, but then the text on the screen cleared and it displayed only "PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT." Given no choice, I did so, and the same thing kept happening. Just that error message.

Not wanting to deal with it at the moment, I left the house to go swimming at a friends house. When I came home, the computer was up and running fine. Nobody else had known earlier that the computer wasn't running properly....and I asked my brother how he got the computer working and he had no idea what I was talking about. Apparently he had booted it up later and it did fine.

Got to work this morning, and my brother tells me that the computer's not booting right, apparently doing the same thing it had been earlier.

What bugs me out about this is that it was working fine at one point and then the problem came back again.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem here is? My system specs are as follows:

Windows XP Home
Asus A7M266 motherboard
256mb PC2100 RAM
AMD Athlon T-bird 1ghz
Geforce 2 MX
Promise Ultra 100 IDE controller card
Quantum Fireball Plus AS 30 GB HDD
the rest I think would be irrelevant.

I'm not sure if this would be a CPU issue, a bad boot sector on the hard drive, a problem with the controller card, or a virus. If its a virus, does anyone know WHAT virus it is, and what I can do to get rid of it?

Thanks in advance.

 

[DaiShan]

I would run memtest86 on the memory to see if that has gone bad, if that doesn't turn up any errors, I would run a thourough scandisk on the drive, I'm thinking one of your components is on its way out.

 

[jstultz]

Okay, started working again, then stopped working again.

Stripped computer down to base components (motherboard, cpu, memory, video, hard drive w/o seperate controller card).

Booting up, the motherboard would recognize the drive as Quantum Fireball AS30.0, then after checking primary slave, secondary master, secondary slave, the computer would stall for a few seconds and display the following error: "Primary Master Drive Fails. Press F1 to continue, ESC to enter Setup"

Of course, if I continue it won't detect the hard drive and will display "Press a key to reboot," obviously since I have nothing to boot from.

At this point, figured that my hard drive was dead, and got pissed, as one would expect. In a last ditch effort, I figured maybe the cable was bad, so I switched it out with another I had lying around. Rebooted, detected fine, started booting into WinXP. So I got real excited that it was just a bad cable, shut down when it got to the logon screen, hooked everything back up, rebooted, worked fine. Then I realized I hadn't reconnected the optical drives right, so I shut down, plugged them in, and rebooted. Got the same thing again. Hard drive wasn't being fully recognized. So I thought, well damn, guess it wasn't a bad cable.

But, since it fixed it temporarily when I replaced the cable, I'm thinking maybe it's a bad connection on the hard drive itself from the IDE plug? Anyone know what I could check to see if it was a bad connection? Or what I could do to temporarily repair it?

See the kicker here is that I just recently ordered Drive Image. At work right now, and I know the UPS package is waiting for me at home. If I can just get it to boot ONE more time, I'll be all set, as I can just plop the image down on the new IBM 60GB drive my dad brought home yesterday. Losing the hard drive itself is not a problem, since I have that one, another 45GB drive, plus the 60GB drive I just mentioned. I just want to get the files off of it so I don't lose them forever (plus I seem to have misplaced my WinXP product key, and don't want to have to bother with that).

Does any one have any suggestions?

 

[GAZZA]

If you were able to boot into WinXP fine without any of your cdrom devices connected then I would think there is some issue with how your optical drives are connected in some way .

Are you using your hard drive connected to the motherboard or to the promise card , and also how are you connecting your optical drive/s ?