Hi, I’m trying to salvage a ten year old system that a couple months ago started behaving badly. It is an iWill KK266-plusR motherboard, 1.5 gig of RAM, AMD 1600+ processor, nVidia 6200 256MB video card and two Maxtor hard drives. It is running Win XP SP3.
Here are the issues. First, we started seeing sporadic crashes while my wife was web surfing. FYI, she surfs a lot of sites in Poland since she is from there. Then we started seeing the system slowing down significantly, initially with the anti-virus update process bringing the system to its knees and then the start up in general taking 15 minutes from the time we see the Windows desktop to a time where you could run an application. At about the same time, the system started crashing more frequently and the system called for disk integrity checks at restart. Interestingly, after the disk checks complete, it takes another 15 minutes or more before the Windows desktop appears. :whiste: The disk drives are Maxtor and when I tried to run a Maxtor diagnostic tool, the system crashed. Malware and anti-virus scans come back clean. System temps appear to be fine.
So, I figured that the issue must tie to the disk drive(s) and decided to try reformatting the C drive followed by a re-install of Win XP. Here is where things get really strange. When I try to get the system to boot off the CD drive, the system will not accept keyboard inputs and so skips any attempt to boot off the CD. It then goes to the safe mode screen and again, no keyboard inputs are accepted. Regardless of whether I use the PS2 connection or USB the key board won’t work in either situation. And yet, the keyboard works just fine while in the BIOS!
So, I figured if I took the hard drive off the boot device list in the BIOS and left just the CD as the only boot device that would force the system to boot off of the CD – wrong.
It still continues on to the hard drive to start the boot process. So, any thoughts as to a cause? I haven’t tried swapping out hard drives, yet.
Here are the issues. First, we started seeing sporadic crashes while my wife was web surfing. FYI, she surfs a lot of sites in Poland since she is from there. Then we started seeing the system slowing down significantly, initially with the anti-virus update process bringing the system to its knees and then the start up in general taking 15 minutes from the time we see the Windows desktop to a time where you could run an application. At about the same time, the system started crashing more frequently and the system called for disk integrity checks at restart. Interestingly, after the disk checks complete, it takes another 15 minutes or more before the Windows desktop appears. :whiste: The disk drives are Maxtor and when I tried to run a Maxtor diagnostic tool, the system crashed. Malware and anti-virus scans come back clean. System temps appear to be fine.
So, I figured that the issue must tie to the disk drive(s) and decided to try reformatting the C drive followed by a re-install of Win XP. Here is where things get really strange. When I try to get the system to boot off the CD drive, the system will not accept keyboard inputs and so skips any attempt to boot off the CD. It then goes to the safe mode screen and again, no keyboard inputs are accepted. Regardless of whether I use the PS2 connection or USB the key board won’t work in either situation. And yet, the keyboard works just fine while in the BIOS!
So, I figured if I took the hard drive off the boot device list in the BIOS and left just the CD as the only boot device that would force the system to boot off of the CD – wrong.
It still continues on to the hard drive to start the boot process. So, any thoughts as to a cause? I haven’t tried swapping out hard drives, yet.
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