Maveric169
The Voices Talk to Me
- Joined
- 5 Dec 2002
- Messages
- 1,148
Well this past weekend (friday actually) my PC decided to have total meltdown. The scary part is I am not sure what is causing the problem. I have a guess but that is all.
It all started when I came home and found my PC locked up in the middle of a backup, so I rebooted the machine. I then received an error saying that NTOSKRNL.EXE was corrupted and that I needed to fix the file with recovery console. In the processes of trying to fix the file my graphics card started shutting down, and on reboot my system informed me that my video card failed POST. After fighting with this for about an hour I could get no response from the video card at all. DEAD JIM, DEAD!! So I went out to best buy and bought a Radeon 9550 AGP card. Not my upgrade preference but I am anorexicly tight budgeted at the moment. So at this point I now have video, but aparently my BIOS took a flying leap as it starts to fail checksums, and refuses to ID the HDDs on my system. So I clear the BIOS, and reboot. This time however I get an error that says that Boot.INI is screwed and that a default is loaded, then the NTOSKRNL.EXE file error again. So again I try to repair the file and then my CD-Rom drive went nuts and EAT my WinXP CD and scrached the hell out of it to the point that the I386 portion was not readable.
So on Saturday I go down to a local PC shop and barrow a WinXP CD. But now my 160GB WD HDD will not run, AT ALL!! No spin up, just a clicking sound. WTF!!! So I grab a brand new 80GB WD drive that I have from my last DOA WD drive and that one won't work either, after several tests and attempts it is DOA out of the box. So I connect my 60GB Maxtor backup drive, format my backup partion, as there is nothing there anyway as the comp crashed in the middle of my scheulded backup, and I installed XP there with no problems. I then tried several times to slave the 160GB drive to no availe. Everytime I connect the 160GB drive the system would lock up. At this point I really thought that all was lost as far as all my data on the drive. So I tried a last ditch effort to shock the drive back to life, I put the drive in the freezer for about 5 mins then quickly hooked up the drive the fired up the computer. Sucesses!! The drive came back to life, and I maddly started tranfering the data to the 60GB drive as fast as it would transfer. I was able to get everything except my backup of my favorites folder when the drive (after working for 2 hrs) totally died.
So waht am i left with, I had a video card die, 2 WD HDDs die, and a CD-Rom drive lose it's mind. Now I have run diagnostic tests on the motherboard, chipset, RAM and Processor and all came back clean with 0 errors. So I am left with 2 possiblilites, 1- I just have some bad luck with WD HDDs and everything else was just a fluke, or 2- my PSU is somehow causing components to fail.
I really just don't know as MBM5 history file showed no significant variances in voltages, all were .10 volts or less which is really good. but at the same time SOMETHING has to have caused this massive failure. I have ordered a new 200GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 Sata drive to replace the 160GB WD drive, but I am worried that the problem might still exist and kill that drive or other components too.
Any thoughts? Is there anything else that is a probable cause for such failures that I am not seeing? I was able to recover a my log file from the last scan McAfee did and it does not show any virus or problems as of 30 mins before the crash. So I don't belive that it was a virus of any kind.
It all started when I came home and found my PC locked up in the middle of a backup, so I rebooted the machine. I then received an error saying that NTOSKRNL.EXE was corrupted and that I needed to fix the file with recovery console. In the processes of trying to fix the file my graphics card started shutting down, and on reboot my system informed me that my video card failed POST. After fighting with this for about an hour I could get no response from the video card at all. DEAD JIM, DEAD!! So I went out to best buy and bought a Radeon 9550 AGP card. Not my upgrade preference but I am anorexicly tight budgeted at the moment. So at this point I now have video, but aparently my BIOS took a flying leap as it starts to fail checksums, and refuses to ID the HDDs on my system. So I clear the BIOS, and reboot. This time however I get an error that says that Boot.INI is screwed and that a default is loaded, then the NTOSKRNL.EXE file error again. So again I try to repair the file and then my CD-Rom drive went nuts and EAT my WinXP CD and scrached the hell out of it to the point that the I386 portion was not readable.
So on Saturday I go down to a local PC shop and barrow a WinXP CD. But now my 160GB WD HDD will not run, AT ALL!! No spin up, just a clicking sound. WTF!!! So I grab a brand new 80GB WD drive that I have from my last DOA WD drive and that one won't work either, after several tests and attempts it is DOA out of the box. So I connect my 60GB Maxtor backup drive, format my backup partion, as there is nothing there anyway as the comp crashed in the middle of my scheulded backup, and I installed XP there with no problems. I then tried several times to slave the 160GB drive to no availe. Everytime I connect the 160GB drive the system would lock up. At this point I really thought that all was lost as far as all my data on the drive. So I tried a last ditch effort to shock the drive back to life, I put the drive in the freezer for about 5 mins then quickly hooked up the drive the fired up the computer. Sucesses!! The drive came back to life, and I maddly started tranfering the data to the 60GB drive as fast as it would transfer. I was able to get everything except my backup of my favorites folder when the drive (after working for 2 hrs) totally died.
So waht am i left with, I had a video card die, 2 WD HDDs die, and a CD-Rom drive lose it's mind. Now I have run diagnostic tests on the motherboard, chipset, RAM and Processor and all came back clean with 0 errors. So I am left with 2 possiblilites, 1- I just have some bad luck with WD HDDs and everything else was just a fluke, or 2- my PSU is somehow causing components to fail.
I really just don't know as MBM5 history file showed no significant variances in voltages, all were .10 volts or less which is really good. but at the same time SOMETHING has to have caused this massive failure. I have ordered a new 200GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 Sata drive to replace the 160GB WD drive, but I am worried that the problem might still exist and kill that drive or other components too.
Any thoughts? Is there anything else that is a probable cause for such failures that I am not seeing? I was able to recover a my log file from the last scan McAfee did and it does not show any virus or problems as of 30 mins before the crash. So I don't belive that it was a virus of any kind.