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[becky7234]

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[8210GUY]

Well the hard drive does appear to have issues, but whether they are the sole cause I am unsure, but that make is not helping, but I am beginning to suspect it is a re-badged Maxtor drive, I used to love these drives, that was until they started messing me about, I have over 600gig of drive space that I can't touch, and they are all Maxtor drives, so I wont touch those anymore.
Lets just see what happens, get and run MaxBlast from Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) and see if that will acknowledge the drive, if it does then it confirms my suspicion about it, and by running their own utility my hope is it will give us a clear good or bad answer about the drive, all drives have bad sectors before we even get them, they are just hidden thats all, now IIRC if the drive is reported as bad it will give you a code to pass on to get an RMA started, but it's been a while so not sure how they work these days, but hopefully it will give a clear answer about this.

[becky7234]

MaxBlast didn't detect the HD. When all else fails, I should read the paperwork that came with the HD--[Formatting your drive]--which mentions PowerMax 4.22 which will supposedly work for most models and manufacturers. Although it wants a floppy, which I dont have. I did find a website that lets you create a boot disk which has that tool. [Per their website-You need the Ultimate Boot CD if you want to:
Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run diagnostic tools on them. Free download at www.ultimatebootcd.com]

So for the moment I'm going to try that. It's so odd that Outlook express on the sick machine is working fast and perfect! Some web pages work fast and perfect- ie Google, and some previously visited pages-cookies-, just BAM! A nanoSecond and it's Right there. But some just never ever load and show [can't be displayed] I looked at all settings under Internet Explorer options /Tools--etc, and everything I read what the settings should be, matched how it is set.
ooooohh mann....this is becomming a never ending and non repairable task. .......

Edited by becky7234, 04 June 2009 - 05:47 AM.

[8210GUY]

Ah so it may be a re-badged Maxtor after all then, PowerMax is their other tool, weird the other one didn't see it though, but yeah the UBCD is a great piece of kit, has near enough every utility you will need, but it's a big download though.but this is looking like a proverbial TV fault, you get the engineer out and it works fine, as soon as he leaves it spits the dummy again. But run that test and see how it goes, so far we have found several components that have had a problem, and this makes troubleshooting a nightmare as you don't know whats affecting anything else, and without being able to check every single component we can't be sure if an item could be causing other parts to mess about, so see how the scan goes.

[becky7234]

Hi, I'm having a problem using the UBC CD. Do you know the steps to USE it? It's an ISO file that Winrar opened, and I burned the contents to a cd, but there must be more that must be done in order for it to be readable. I put it in the sick machine and set to boot from CD, but it didnot. Can you download it, and view the files [website-tutorials-convert] I need the steps to be able to use the disc.

[8210GUY]

Don't have time to go into detail, got a gig to sort in a couple of hours and loads to do, but in brief you do NOT extract an ISO, you burn it as is, nothing more, logically if you double click on the ISO your default burning software should launch and ask if you want to burn it, just say yes, give it a CD to do it with and off you go. Then what you do is boot to the disk, you may need to change your boot order to do this, but when it loads keep an eye open, you may well get a message saying hit enter to boot from the disk, if you don't do this in time it will boot to windows normally, if that happens just reboot and try again. Once you get into it you will see a list, go to hard drives, a new list will appear, go to diagnostics, a new list will appear and you select the program appropriate for the drive, if you want to go back a level to a previous menu, simply click on the row of dots at the top .......... and it will go back 1 step each time, hope that gets you what you need.

[becky7234]

Burning the CD as a data file didn't work, so I burned as an image file [I think it suggested that in FAQ] and it worked! The only problem was that the program I was looking for was not on that CD. I read in the forums of the site that it was removed when Maxtor/Seagate changed. So I looked through the tools, and ran a HDscan that said I had 54 bad sectors and it could not repair a non-Maxtor HD. I had re-installed/repaired the OS so many times on the HD--So after reviewing some of the tools, I decided to completely erase my HD [2 hours- and there was nothing on it!] and do a fresh XP install. I will let you know how I'm progressing.

[8210GUY]

We keep coming back to drive errors, there can be no doubt you have a bad drive, but how to prove it's failing is another problem, being a no name it's making it so much harder, I can only suggest having a look at SeaTools on the disk, as I think thats whats replaced the Maxtor software. By all means see how this install goes, but I fear we are just going round in circles, would this drive be under warranty by any chance ? I really hope it is, if so contact where you got it from, tell them the scans are reporting bad sectors and see if they will replace it, I don't think we will get any further until ALL the components are confirmed working. *edit Forgot to say, if you can change it go for a WD hard drive and you should be set.

Edited by 8210GUY, 04 June 2009 - 08:20 PM.

[becky7234]

I chose to install XP Pro, because all kinds of weird window views, and still no loads with the pages using XP Home. Things were going smoothly [omg omg] no page lags, no slow loads. But this smoning I have the blue screen of death and auto shutdown.

[8210GUY]

IMHO until you have replaced ALL faulty hardware you are banging your head on a brick wall, what I suspect has happened is the other PSU went bad or you had a power spike, and in the process it's damaged several components, sometimes it's better if the components died, because you'd know exactly what was wrong, but unless your able to prove each bit of hardware is OK you will be going round in circles chasing ghosts. Are you able to RMA the hard drive ? it's definitely got faults and is probably messing you about.

[becky7234]

Have another PSU. I was smoothly sailing along with everything working perfectly for 5 days. Then my McAfee antivirus suite wouldn't activate, due to an "error". Its free from my ISP provider www.comcast.net. So I uninstalled it and decided to reinstall it. At boot up WIN XP gave me the BSOD with the announcement that a>>> [\windows\system32\config\system] <<<was missing or corrupt.??

WHAT???? caused this >>>\windows\system32\config\system<< to go missing or corrupt??
All I uninstalled was McAfee, did it take this vital componet with it? I read the Ms article:
Article ID: 307545 - Last Review: March 26, 2009 - Revision: 11.0
How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting


OH! MY GOD- no thanks. Its way too much to do, mainly because I don't have anything to recover
so I am AGAIN erasing my HD with the Ultimate Boot Disk tools. Which is a coolTool for recovery assistance!!
How many times can you erase a hard drive???

Edited by becky7234, 10 June 2009 - 05:45 AM.

[8210GUY]

Well IMHO until you can prove ALL the hardware is good and working right, you are possibly going to be forever chasing your tail, it is a very nasty situation to be in, because you can be chasing ghosts trying to fix problems that are only occurring to faulty hardware. You can wipe a hard drive many times without issue, I believe there is a limit, but it's so high you'll probably never hit it, but have you RMA'd the faulty drive or replaced it yet ? Until you do this will only ever get worse, not sure if it's been done yet, but run a memory scan as well, it's on the UBCD, boot to the disk then run the memory diagnostic, let it run for a while and see if that finds any issues.