Computer problems

Wooz

Wooz

Vault Sweeper
Admin
Board Cop oTO
Orderite
First of all, sorry to mess up the board with my personal tech problems. I've already asked a number of people's advice and opinions about what the hell is happening to my computer, with no results... Thought I'd post the situation here, hoping somebody will come up with some useful advice.


Recently, I had some trouble with the Sasser worm under XP Home Edition. Since none of the antivirii, worm scanners and magic fix-tools from Symantec worked, I formatted my drive and installed Windows XP pro, thinking it will be less a piece of shit than HE. The whole operation was a success, I downloaded shortly after the Win update thing and my PC was working fine again, free from worms or virii.

Until.

I shut down the computer. The next time I started it up again, a blue screen appeared instead of the XP "Loading/Welcome" It said my PC didn't have enough Boot volume to start up, and to avoid any damage to my computer, it should be shut down. I shrugged, formatted my system partition and reinstalled WinXP. But then again, it didn't have the time to load and an identical blue screen popped out, this time claiming there's a problem with some graphic card driver, and the usual "if you see this screen for the first time, reboot your computer, if the problem persists, contact your graphic card manufacturer (thank you for using vault-tec)".

I reinstalled XP HE with the same results. Formatted and reinstalled around 6 times.
I took another drive with Win98 and set it as a master drive, to check if the other one was accessible. Didn't work either, the only thing that loaded were the plug'n'play device setup screens.

So, guys, gals, any advice besides "d00d j00R Fuxx0r3d"?

Please don't spam up this thread, I'm on a very slow dial-up connection computer (not to mention I have to type on a french keyboard).
 
d00d j00r fuxx0r3d


Ok, seriously.


What is your system specs? Mainly, what graphics card, processer and mobo
 
Geforce 2, Celeron 600, can't remember the motherboard.

XP loaded before, I don't think it's a low-memory problem...
 
@Montez: No prob'

@APTYP: "Flashing" ?

Excuse my ignorance in this matter... How or what should I do in order to "flash" it?
 
1. Find out what motherboard model you have.
2a. Go to manufacturer website, or
2b. Run a search on the internet.
3. Once you obtain the latest BIOS image file for your model, find a flashing program. Usually website you got the image from has links or recommendations on which program you should use.
4. Make sure BIOS write protection is off in BIOS setup.
5. Read further instructions in the program manual. Flashing is not something you do on a daily basis, so I don't remember the details.
 
Thanks, I'll try that.

I hope the program doesn't need an OS to run, otherwise I dunno how I'm going to run it since the blue screen pops up just before initializing XP.
 
the BIOS is, to the best of my knowledge, a program written right on your Mobo. You wont need an installed OS for it to work.
 
Yeah, you just copy the BIOS flashing stuff onto a floppy and boot it up that way, no OS needed. BTW, can you access the bios at all now? If you don't know how, you just hold down F8 or F5 and keep it pressed while you boot up.
 
Edit

Ok, ran the BIOS flash with no problems this time, updated it. XP is installing itself, I'll let you know if the flash thing resolved the problem as soon as I come back from art school.

/Edit
 
I think the easiest way is to bring the computer for someone professional. Our computer had 5 years warrantly and always when it screwed itself we brought it to pro people and upgradet it for free. Saves time.
 
I think if Wooz's computer had a valid warranty, he wouldn't be here asking questions.
 
warranty... hmm if things in Poland are the same as here in Romania Wooz would be better off hammering his computer into working condition... I bought my first computer from a firm that was considered top notch back then and after one month the seal, that sticker just came off, it unglued itself without any particular reason... and then most of the components began to crap out just a few weeks after the warranty had expired... Around here the "experts":
a) know what they are doing but will steal you blind given half the chance
b) are clueless, they sell you this already assembled computer, claiming that it has a certain configuration and when you take a closer look it's a whole different thing; sometimes they even put in extra things, or better parts than they were supposed to, or they could leave stuff out... it's like gambling :lol:
 
*Curses*

Didn't work. On top of it, I managed to catch a cold of some sort. Fucking great.

After all this, there are a number of options:

A) My graphic card is fried (don't hope so)

B) My motherboard is fried (don't think so, the BIOS works fine)

C) My graphic card has troubles communicating with the motherboard (hmmm... great, how do I fix this?)

In any case, I'd have to check the integrity of the graphic card on another computer compatible with it, which I have not. A friend that studies electronic engineering and informatics will prolly look into it this weekend, hopefully...

No, I don't have a warranty, my computer is assembled from different pieces bought at the Warsaw electronics market, a haven for very cheap and very good computer equipment. I bought this graphics card around four or five years ago, never had this problem before.
 
Did you try hitting the computers case? not with a hammer or anything, just a rolled up magazine will do.

If not, it may be time to replace your graphics card.

I had similar problems a few years back... my graphics card just kinda, died. so i got pissed, took it out, beat it with a hammer a little, determined that it was in fact, broken. then i bought a newer better one... problem solved.
 
Hmm, I think I got that Blue Screen Hard Disk error. One question. What type of file system are you using? I once had that trouble when making a partition that was FAT32 and another one that was NTFS. Whenever I tried to change the file system to NTFS from FAT32, I got that error. Might be worth a shot.
 
Try to check in BIOS if the AGP is set correctly (4x?) or better run fdisk and mess with the drive w/ formatting the boot sector and total partitioning (if the other system won't read the partition, it's surely the drive).

I once had another drive problem and it helped.
 
Q: When you partinioned the drive did you left space for the boot volume?

Q: After the first reboots did you install SP1 and DX9b?

Q: Did you try the 4x.xx drives that are better for your old card or did you went for the 3x.xx or 5x.xx?

Q: Did you installed the security patches and a firewall, or the XP firewall?

Q: More importantly did you set up the bios after the instalation manually or did you just went for the default settings?
 
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