Why does this PC do this every time I look away?

[CZroe]

I've been trying to work on recovering someone's dead hard drive in my computer for a week now. I cannot access the drive in any OS but DOS and even then only 1 out of 12 boots will allow me to. So, using a DOS boot disk, I should have any other problems except the drive. Usually, the only time I have to work on it is late at night (3:00AM or later) so when it's taking 15 minutes to copy a directory I fall asleep. If I wait, the command usually finishes just fine and I can get started on another directory. However, when I check the screen is almost always blank, the keyboard lights are on, the fans and system's lights are off. It's not sleep mode. The power light would be on and it doesn't respond to the keyboard or mouse. Pressing power causes the lights to come back on and the fans to spin up yet I still have a blank screen until I cycle the power again.

This is a retail 1.3GHz P4 with 384MB Samsung memory (Included by Intel with P4 processors) on a retail P4 D850GB and an nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200. Basically, no non-standard hardware. What the hell is this?

Oh, and it just happened again, this time while I was looking away writing this after booting and not running any commands.

 

[CraigRT]

odd..the computer probably gets confused cause it can't read/write and it restarts or shuts down... just a hunch.

 

[emjem]

That hdd is bad man. That's what the weird behavior is all about. Why it crashes when you look away has to do with universal chaos theory.

 

[WarCon]

Is there any power management on in the bios?

 

[CZroe]

I don't think it's the drive because it does it even when I leave it on the boot menu that the boot floppy gives me. It IS power management setting related. I tried disabling power settings for HDDs but it still does it. Hmm...

 

[Harabecw]

Originally posted by: CZroe

This is a retail 1.3GHz P4.

Wow. weren't they all recalled?

 

[bocamojo]

I would unplug the machine from the wall, take out the CMOS battery for about 10 minutes, and while the CMOS is out, press and hold the power button for about 15 to 20 seconds. If you have a CMOS clear jumper, be sure to set it to reset. After that, I would reseat all video, RAM, HDD cables, etc. Then, plug everything back up, and go into the BIOS, and set everything up to be standard (no overclocking). Make sure you set your video to the proper selection of AGP, and make sure you don't have any power management enabled. Hopefully, that will get you going. If not, then it is likely a hardware related issue. Good luck.

Oops. Sorry. Just reread your post. You're computer works fine without the friend's faulty drive, right? I was assuming this was an entire PC problem... If it just happens with this drive, check and make sure you have it set as a master with the jumpers set properly. If there's no worries about data on the drive, I'd run a low level format on it, and see if it becomes stable/usable again.

 

[emjem]

You started this thread with:

Originally posted by: CZroe
I've been trying to work on recovering someone's dead hard drive in my computer for a week now.

That about says it all. Failing or bad hard drives cause strange things to happen.

 

[Chobits]

1.3Ghz Pentium 4? I thought they started at 1.4Ghz and if there were 1.3Ghz P4s you might have found the problem IT might be wacked out like that 1.13Ghz P3

 

[CZroe]

They did start at 1.4GHz... Simultaneously released with the 1.5GHz CPU. The 1.3GHz CPU was released later, but before 1.6GHz CPUs (just like the slower ULV PIII Tualatins were released after the 1.2GHz parts). I have the retail box still with the special blue Samsung RDRAM (Retail was a bargain then because Intel included sticks of the then exorbantly expensive RDRAM). Yes Virginia, there is a 1.3GHz P4: It says 1.3GHz on the retail box.

 

[Jojo7]

Yea. I've seen this problem before.
When I had a bad hdd connected to the system, the fans would start spinning and stuff but I wouldn't get any video. It turns out that the bad hdd was making the system not "fully" power up. The fans would only spin at a very low rate when the bad hdd was connected. I thought it was very strange. Put a new hard drive in the system and it worked great -- fans worked at full speed and I got the machine to post.