Starting to have some system problems

[JohnR]

My system is starting to get flaky and I'd like thoughts on whether I'm dealing with a single or multiple problems

System
Shuttle AK31 (266A)
2 PC2100 256M Crucial DDR
Athlon 1.4Ghz
IBM deskstar 80gig in 2 partitions
GeForce 3
Audigy Sound card
floppy, DVD, monitor
300 W PS
Windows XP (Fat32 file system)

all drivers up to date, I'm not overclocking.

Okay, I built this thing in October and for the first several months it ran great; I don't think I had a single crash for 3 months (never had that happen with a windows system before). Then I started getting periodic crash to desktops. Also, if I had to reboot the system, it would often lock up on a plain blue screen; a cold reboot would result in a disk scan during the boots, and frequently a bad sector would be identified. This happens on 60-75% of all reboots. I have defragged both partitions and run scans, but I'm not sure how to run a surface scan of the disk (utility seems not included with XP).

But I could live with that. Today, as I was working on a document, I heard what I think was an audible popping sound and the monitor went blank, and immediately I heard a single repetitive tone from the case (like a post failure: is there a singificance to the pattern of the tones? This was just a single 2 second tone, repeating). Uh-oh. So I powered down and rebooted from cold start and sure enough, POST failure. I started reseating cards and when I pulled the 2nd DDR and rebooted it failed, but when I pulled the 1st DIMM and place the second DDR into the first slot, the system booted. I then placed the (? faulty) DIMM into the second slot and the system again booted fine. I am running default memory voltages and timings.

Here are my questions
1) Can I explain a lot of my systems problems with a flaky DIMM? If so, why am I getting bad sector problems on the hard drive?
2) What happened today? I'm writing it off to dust in the contacts, is that reasonable?
3) How do I do a detailed scan of the hard drive and have the bad sectors marked so Windows doesn't keep writing to them (at least, I'm assuming it's the same bad sector as opposed to steady detrioration of my hard drive).

Thanks for any thoughts!

Yours,
John Respass

 

[cholley]

check to make sure your power supply fan is spinning,
check all of your fans, that tone could be temp alarm and the system cooled off while you where swapping ram,
check the ibm web site for hard drive utilities, they are in a class action law suit due to the hard drives

 

[DaiShan]

first off, those bad sectors in your hdd are not good, honestly I would backup my data, and request an RMA, next for the memory problem, the system searches the memory banks in a certain order, when you placed a good stick in the frist slot, it satisfied the computers need for good RAM in that slot, if the next stick it bad, it is likely that the computer will still boot. I would run memtest86 for about 10 loops, and then I would use the IBM drive fitness test on the hdd, this will determine the problems (if any) and error codes so you can RMA. also with your via chipset, you are prone to compatibility issues, check the forum checklist for these issues and fixes.