Curious Medley of Issues

Wang Chung · Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 7:23 pm Post subject: Curious Medley of Issues

The other week as I'm about to head to NJ, the morning of, my parents say their PC is no longer working. It's a little POS box I built - WinXP, originally had a RAID that mirrored the hard drive, but that somehow broke and I never got it to work again so i scrapped it. Had a few other weird issues with some cheap components, but it's worked well for a while.

So I finally checked it out. I tried to boot it, no video and horrendous noise. So I crack it open and much to my surprise, it's not as dusty as I thought. Here's the kicker - the video card has a broken fan blade. The horrendous noise has been this thing wobbling like hell. It's an old TI-4200 that I bought years ago and was working GREAT For them. So I assumed the card had been overheating / was overheated - i popped it out and replaced it with some GeForce 2 POS because the most graphics-intense thing they do is play Snood on it.

So I have that in, and now I'm getting the ol' "Disk Read Error" when I try to boot it. Re-seated the IDE cables and whatnot, they seemed fine. I'm going to try to replace them, as well as try to boot with the CD drive disconnected - it's a flaky POS drive anyway.

So the thing that bothers me is, this machine was working fine, but it's a shock for the HD to be totally corrupted. I loaded up Spinrite which immediately started repairing shit, and said it would take 2400 hours to complete or something insane like that. I really hope it's just the IDE cable or something bizarre.

If this doesn't work I guess I'll pop it into an enclosure and see if I can recover data, then reformat it or put a new drive in.

Weird, huh?
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Atomiktoaster · Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 10:33 pm Post subject:

Sometimes I think that computers decide to go crazy when there's nobody around who knows how they work. How does a fan blade break anyway?

Raed · Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 11:15 pm Post subject:

Atomiktoaster wrote:

How does a fan blade break anyway?

QFE
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Wang Chung · Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2009 11:25 pm Post subject:

It's really beyond me. I have no clue how that happened. It was completely untouched by any of my family. Just inside of it's little thing. I've never seen anything like it.
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Wang Chung · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2009 9:02 pm Post subject:

To follow up on this, I ran Spinrite on modes #2 AND #4 for like 2-3 days and it cleared up a bunch of shit, but there was one sector AT THE BEGINNING OF THE DRIVE that it could not fix. Then I ran chkdsk /r to appease windows (I got into safemode). For shits and giggles I replaced the IDE cable but I don't think that was the issue.

Now I'm getting PAGED FAULT IN NON-PAGED AREA (BSOD, after Windows logo loads and comes up).
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is now -=|CT|=- Frothy Mixture

Stealth · Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2009 4:59 pm Post subject:

LOL.
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Motherfucking Triangles! Being all three sided n' shit, who do they think they are?!

Wang Chung · Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2009 6:37 pm Post subject:

Smore LOL - I swapped the RAM out, no luck. I found an 80GB hard drive and I was going to copy shit over to that. I was confused because the HD was reading 28 GB - I looked again, and I had mistook the 3 for an 8. Sonofabitch.
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is now -=|CT|=- Frothy Mixture