Ok here is what I've been dealing with on and off for the last 3 weeks.
3 weeks ago: My computer randomly rebooted. I opened up the case because it was rather odd, and I felt the power supply...it was like 1000000 degrees. I noticed when I turned it off and then back on that the fan inside of it, an Antec True Power 420 or whatever the 400 wattish one is, wasn't working. So I decided to put an extra case fan I had around next to it to cool it off. It worked fine for about an hour and then BAM....reboot. I said I don't want to deal with this crap and I ordered up a new Fortron 400 watt with a kewl blue light in it. That showed up 3 days later and worked like a champ for about 6 hours and then....reboot. I was like wtf, this is really odd. I took out one of my drives, a Seagate 80GB Cuda IV and decided that I would rma my motherboard.
2 Weeks ago The motherboard was sent back to Newegg and I had a spare Epox 8kha+ that was doing nothing except being a boring mp3 server so I decided that I would hijack that and make it my PC till my DFI board came back. I threw in the 80GB Seagate, Radeon 9500, and a 512MB stick of Corsair XMS PC3200 that was in my DFI board into the Epox. I decided just to use the same 1600+ that was already in the board instead of my Tbred B 1700+. This setup worked like a champ and gave me no problems, excluding the fact that it was a lot slower than my other setup.
Yesterday: After Newegg refunded me (I asked for a repair rma but they refunded
) me my money I again purchased a DFI Infinity that I had before. It showed up yesterday and I threw it back into my case along with all my other parts (Radeon, Ram, HD, etc.). I attempted to format and reinstall Windows XP on my 160GB drive but it gave me the same freakin error it was giving me 3 weeks ago . I figured then that maybe the MBR was toast so I ran the recovery console from my XP disc and ran fixmbr and got this:http://home.comcast.net/~roost0r/fixmbr_easy_read.JPG
Each time I press Y to do that and then run it again I get the same error "An Interrupt 13 hook was detected". I tried to do some research on what that meant and I guess it was a virus created in 1990, maybe someone here will have more insight on it. Anyway, I decided to try a chkdsk /p and this is what happened:
http://home.comcast.net/~roost0r/chkdsk.JPG
Doesn't seem like anything special to me but maybe I'm not seeing something. So then I decided to run Powermax since the two drives in the PC right now are 160GB and 60GB Maxtors, my Seagate is in a USB 2.0 enclosure now. I ran both the quick test http://home.comcast.net/~roost0r/basic_test.JPG and the advanced test http://home.comcast.net/~roost0r/advanced_test.JPG with both passing. I then ran Partition Magic 8 and found this http://home.comcast.net/~roost0r/partitionmagic8.JPG which I thought the fixmbr would fix but it didn't. My last effort was to run the Maxblast and it said it was recreating the mbr but the same problems keep happening. Now everytime I start up the PC and don't press a key for a boot cd I get this http://home.comcast.net/~roost0r/bootfromcd.JPG . If I do press a key before that comes up it starts the windows XP installation but after the formatting and copying of files is done it reboots and then says 'Error loading OS'. Any ideas on wtf is going on here? I am stuck using this laptop which isn't so bad but I can't play many of my games on it. I was going to just install Mandrake 9.2 on the pc and it seemed like it was working but I never let it fully install. I want to dual boot XP and Mandrake and I know how picky windows is about being on the drive first.
If you need some clarification let me know, I'm pretty furious right now and not all of this may make sense. If it doesn't tell me and I'll try to explain some more.
