Requesting help with troubleshooting.

REDCHAOSTRY

Junior Member
Jun 21, 2002
6
0
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To anyone that can help,

I was resently asked by a friend to look at his PC. It is a 2-3 year old Gateway, 1.8Gig Intel rig. Upon observation I found the following:

1. A very long windows boot time, normally 3-7 minutes. During which the computer is completely unresponsive.

2. What appears to be a HDD failing. It operates normally for a random lenght of time then you can hear it power and spin down. A few seconds later it attempts to restart 2-3 times before the computere completely locks and gives a Blue screen of death.

3. When the above blue screen of death appears, it gives a kernel_inpage error. I appoligize for the lack of exact error, as this is hours and miles away. Next time I will write this error down.

4. Random lock up on boot. The computer just stops in the middle of the boot cycle. This happened twice during the gateway logo, which is at the very beginning of the boot.

If anyone could give me some suggestions as to what action to take I would greatly appreciate it. I was thinking of having him format the drive and trying a complete reinstall. Only that the pc also locked up during the boot, before even reading the HDD.

Thank you for your time and help.
 

Hajime

Senior member
Oct 18, 2004
617
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71
Reinstalling won't help. Sounds like the hd really is failing - you can try Spinrite or a similar program, or you'll have to outright replace the drive.

Likely the latter, and I don't see any way around it.
 

Fern

Elite Member
Sep 30, 2003
26,907
174
106
Find out the brand of HD, go to the manufacturers site and look for their free diagnotic proggie to confirm HD failure.
 

oneshot47

Senior member
Aug 6, 2004
435
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Also check the voltages on the 12 and 5v rails, with a mm if you can, or in the bios if not. A low voltage can cause those same things as a failing hd.

(btw, you might want to put a little summary in the title or something to get more people to look at it)