computer just died

[Karr Lord of Chaos]

it started crashing today after some bordum searches - gave me a fatal hardware message. i set it up to do a scan disk at restart and then restarted it. the computer went through both scans and found nothing but just endlessly looped from there. now it wont even reconize any of my drives.

not sure what i am going to do, i guess i dont have a choice, i will have to buy a new tower. i havent the money for this kind of expense

you probaly wont see me around for a while since using the labtop is sez's gig.

[Red Dragon]

Re: computer just died

Reformat it?

[Karr Lord of Chaos]

Re: computer just died

not even possible, cmos is now even fragged. i am going to have to buy a new computer set and hope that i can recover my stuff from the old drive. i dont feel like loosing 20 gigs of music, 15 years of crap, or a bunch of other crap thats important.

[Red Dragon]

Re: computer just died

Instead of getting a whole new computer you could always just get a new harddrive. Set up a new partition and try a file recovery.

[Karr Lord of Chaos]

Re: computer just died

might try that, though im not sure how im going to tackle the cmos problem. i cant even get it to select any changes i want to make to the settings. maybe a new motherboard is in order. i have always wanted a flat screen monitor and a keyboard that doesnt need cd cases to keep it upright.

[Translucid]

Re: computer just died

try using a linux boot disc. then you can at least try and put your stuff on a flash drive and transfer it the slow way.

[Red Dragon]

Re: computer just died

might try that, though im not sure how im going to tackle the cmos problem. i cant even get it to select any changes i want to make to the settings. maybe a new motherboard is in order. i have always wanted a flat screen monitor and a keyboard that doesnt need cd cases to keep it upright.

Oh ok, you just want this to be an excuse to buy a new fancy computer.

[Sezjeuric]

Re: computer just died

So yeah, I came home to what looked like a computer elephant graveyard... was that all ONE computer?

Karr texted me before he went to bed to warn me that the computer was on the fritz. When I came home and saw the pieces all over the floor, I thought, "Hmm, I wonder if this was done in anger..."

Karr, you could always hit up your uncles for some pieces... they literally have a computer elephant graveyard taking up their whole basement.... nerds.

[JLaCroix]

Re: computer just died

How do you know your CMOS is fragged? If it lets you, you could flash the BIOS if it comes down to it. That may fix your other problems but if not let me know.

[Translucid]

Re: computer just died

yeah, cmon. there are a number of avenues you can take to try and fix this problem, you don't have to say HUP, GOTTA BUY ME A NOO COMPUTER THIS ONES GONE FUR

[JLaCroix]

Re: computer just died

yeah, cmon. there are a number of avenues you can take to try and fix this problem, you don't have to say HUP, GOTTA BUY ME A NOO COMPUTER THIS ONES GONE FUR

I agree for the most part, but some of the people that threaten to replace the whole computer realize that their machine is too old by todays standards. However, I don't know how old his computer is so I can't say that.

Replacing the motherboard, if it comes down to it, is cheaper. I have one in my closet I'm selling although there is a slim chance it's a matching architecture, since I'm an AMD guy and almost everyone seems to like Intel for some mysterious reason.

I'll be glad to give advice as necessary, on the condition that we all don't jump to conclusions and buy a new machine out of frustration.

The BIOS update, if the machine allows it or is not broken to the point where that's not possible, is a likely avenue. I had a similar issue with my previous motherboard where the BIOS generated random device ID's making Windows think all of the devices were changed every time it rebooted, confusing it to hell. A BIOS update did fix it, however I think that was mostly a Vista issue as XP doesn't care about the Device ID's as much as Vista does.

[Sezjeuric]

Re: computer just died

Guys, there is no hope.

Karr TOUCHED the computer.


It's over.




It's in pieces on my floor.

And that friggen keyboard ****** me off

[JLaCroix]

Re: computer just died

Guys, there is no hope.

Karr TOUCHED the computer.


It's over.




It's in pieces on my floor.

And that friggen keyboard ****** me off

Seriously? I thought you were joking around.

There's always hope. It can be put back together. I could have it fixed in less than an hour if I had it in my office.

[Karr Lord of Chaos]

Re: computer just died

i got cmos to fix itself, hurray for surrender!

i still cant get it to reconize my drives though. ive tried different slots, i put in a replacement ribbon i had in my parts bin, i even tried putting in the drive disk - no luck. it goes through the ram check, then it checks the drives and says none for all of them. then it goes into "varifying DMI pool data" and crashes with an error (disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter). enter doesnt produce any results, no mater whats in the drive (keyboard works since i can get into cmos).

my computer is old, though with what i use it for it should be ok. my main concern is the drives since i have alot of important stuff on there. i really hope its not fragged since this is what happened 10 years ago when i first decided to get rid of my 486.

edit: now when i put the drive disk in to fix the bios it produces a random result. sometimes it will stall, other times it wont even start to load, other times it will get to the choose langauge in the drive set up yet you cant change anything. if its feeling really mean, it will just say i dont have enough drive letters and stop.

i think the motherboard is fragged.

[JLaCroix]

Re: computer just died

i got cmos to fix itself, hurray for surrender!

i still cant get it to reconize my drives though. ive tried different slots, i put in a replacement ribbon i had in my parts bin, i even tried putting in the drive disk - no luck. it goes through the ram check, then it checks the drives and says none for all of them. then it goes into "varifying DMI pool data" and crashes with an error (disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter). enter doesnt produce any results, no mater whats in the drive (keyboard works since i can get into cmos).

my computer is old, though with what i use it for it should be ok. my main concern is the drives since i have alot of important stuff on there. i really hope its not fragged since this is what happened 10 years ago when i first decided to get rid of my 486.

edit: now when i put the drive disk in to fix the bios it produces a random result. sometimes it will stall, other times it wont even start to load, other times it will get to the choose langauge in the drive set up yet you cant change anything. if its feeling really mean, it will just say i dont have enough drive letters and stop.

i think the motherboard is fragged.

Did you check in the BIOS to make sure each drive slot is set to Auto? I know that's rather simple but some motherboards may set themselves to "none" so it will never find them. You could also try the option to load fail-safe defaults if you haven't already. Make sure the ribbon is an 80-pin ribbon.

Edit: If the IDE controller is defective, you could buy a PCI IDE controller card and run the drives off of that.