What's the problem?

[PWNettle]

Saturday evening, my PC died in mid-game - said something about a kernel problem, spontaneously rebooted, but wouldn't boot. I managed to boot with the windows cd, run chkdsk, and (don't remember the exact msg) got a message about too many things to fix.

So, I bough a new drive and spent the rest of the night reinstalling stuff. The computer seemed to be fine. It powered up and functional all thru sunday.

This morning (monday), the PC was hosed again in a different way - with errors about primary disk and such.

I've had mixed results booting soft and hard. Sometimes I can get all the way into windows, but the sysem is sluggish and eventually dies. Sometimes I can't get past the first bios screen (it'll say press DEL to enter but it's hung there). Sometimes I can hit DEL to enter bios but it goes into this kind of diagnostic mode and gets hung up at the drive. Sometimes I can get into bios settings but everything looks fine.

I built this PC a year ago. Last hardware change was updating vid card about 2 months ago. The PC has always run fine til now. I don't OC.

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
1g corsair value ram
Asus K8V mobo

old drive was a matrox 120g sata
new drive is a matrox 160g ide/133

Other info.

The new drive autodetected just fine in bios.

I noticed this morning some clicking and a regular beep/squeak sound that occurs when I boot or when I sometimes get to windows. It almost sounds like a screwed HD click - but it's a new drive and I'm sure I didn't hear that sound when I was reinstalling windows or using the PC yesterday.

Any ideas?

 

[amdskip]

What power supply are you using? That noise could be your new hard drive struggling because of the power supply.

 

[PWNettle]

I have an antec sonata I and I believe it has a 380 psu, and I've never had problems with it. I don't have a lot of peripherals.

Stock heatsink and fan, rear case fan, evga 6800gs agp (been in the 'puter for 2 months or more) and a simple soundblaster pci card added at the same time.

I could try a different power cable...not sure if it'd help?

 

[PWNettle]

What's happening now is I boot and see the asus logo screen and it'll hang there a while...and ultimately show a msg saying:

Primary Master Hard Disk Error

So, did I get a lemon when I got my new HD - that somehow lasted for a day and a half?

Could my mobo battery be dead even though it's a year old?

<sigh>

 

[PWNettle]

Forget this thread. I took the IDE back and got another SATA instead, which I probably should've done in the first place. Windows is installing now, and we'll see how it goes.