Bifurcated Rivets
Eclectica for epopts

Comments

6 Feb 2005

*SIGH* I cannot work out what the hell is wrong with this damn PC. Today I took it apart : unolugged every cable, took out every card and I vacummed the whole thing. Put it back together and the damn thing still calimed there was a read error disc. Knoppix of course boots fine and can see the disk. I ran the Seagate diagnostics and they claim that the disc is fine. Is it the disc? Is it the motherboard? Is it something else entirely. I managed to clear whatever it was and reboot into Windows and it runs fine, until it randomly fails again claiming a bad block. I/O on the disc does seem to be a requirement failure (I think) - I can always make it fail by trying to install Sims 2, though it will fail at entirely different places every time. (When installing Windows I get random errors trying to read from the CD - different every time you try. Knoppix reads fine from both the CDs though).



Toss the damn thing and get an iMac!

ole

bad memory? silently overclocking and not telling you? a wierd MB/BIOS which linux resets cleanly but windoze doesn't? does Windows 98 install/run cleanly (much simpler OS arch, boots via DOS rather than direct into a 'modern' kernel)

george

Reset the motherboard Bios, Geo has something there....then, just to be safe, rewrite the boot sector on the drive.

Lynn

What happened to your ibook?

Pancho

I would tend to think that it must be memory related. I cannot think of another explanation for such random failures.

Chris Wraith

<i>I can always make it fail by trying to install Sims 2, though it will fail at entirely different places every time</i><br /> Avoid this problem by playing Sim-Sims2, simply buy several dolls and move them about their home whilst backmasking episodes of pingu.

Daishi

I've seen line voltage problems cause similar symptoms. . . Do you have a good UPS to test?

jp