when it rains it pours

[Skiing Squirrel]

I am pretty ****ed off right now. A computer I built for a friend died on us earlier on this week. Now, in my main rig, it seems both of my harddrives died. The first one died, because one of two reasons. I overclocked my geforce3 pretty mildly, so perhaps that could have been the cause, but doubt it. The second reason could have been that I decided to change some of the settings in the bios. For example, my 1700+ which is capable of doing 2.2ghz, I decided to try to go for a higher fsb. So I had the stock multiplyer, and put the fsb at 175.

I have PC-2700 made by OCZ, so I thought it would be able to run it. Bam. Restart, and harddrive corruption, or so it seems. So I reset Cmos, and plug second HDD in. I boot up to windows, and the screen is all messed up. It is in 4bit color mode, and I cant change out of it, and the resolution is all out of whack. What gives? I mean, I have all my data backed up on a HDD that I cant even reach? Am I out of luck? I also tried to get my P3 rig to work... But it didnt. I will be posting a message in the iwill section soon too. Have a good one.

 

[stool]

First thing to try is DL the diagnostic program for your HDs. There is a sticky at the top of the Storage section with links to most popular ones. Run them and verify if your drives are a problem, or are OK. You may have caused enough corruption on a drive that you may need to reinstall. Do everything at stock or default settings first, one drive at a time.

 

[Skiing Squirrel]

*smacks self* thanks stool! But no all I need is a floppy to save those files on! What? My computer Im one cant have a floppy disk? Jeez, this makes things interesting! Thanks for the advice though, I will see what I can do... Hey, I got all night.

 

[JigPu]

Well, for the second hard drive, it sounds like it's having video card or monitor issues. Win98 (dunno what you're using) would never detect my video card when I swapped HDs from computers, so the monitor was usualy at a resolution too high for it, or at a refresh rate that it didn't like, or something. Also, if windows was having issues installing vid drivers, that might explain the 'permanant' 4-bit color.

Your first HD may be toast, but I think you're second HD is fine... Windows is just being picky I think.
JigPu

 

[Skiing Squirrel]

Im using XP for both of them... I am going to try another vid card and see if that will work.

 

[stool]

You could probably also burn the diagnostics onto a CD if necessary.

 

[Skiing Squirrel]

I just loaded the diagnostics on to a disk. Thanks a ton for compiling all those links! I am going to try it on the main rig right now. thanks.

 

[Skiing Squirrel]

I got my main rig running, and found most of the data on one of the harddrives. Now, all I need to do is find out what is wrong with my Iwill ds133-r. For some reason, everytime I boot up, it will boot up the first time, and everything will be fine. But when I shutdown, and the next time I try to boot up, I have to clear the CMOS in order to get it to post and boot up. Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[Skiing Squirrel]

bump...Im totally stumped on this.

 

[irish80122]

Just for clarification purposes, did this just happen out of the blue, or did something happen to cause this? Thanks.

 

[Skiing Squirrel]

I do not know. I bought this off ebay, and he said everything was working fine. I never got the chance to get this thing running until yesterday, and I bought this thing off ebay months ago. Im thinking its either something with the cpu, psu, or bios chip.

 

[irish80122]

I do not know. I bought this off ebay, and he said everything was working fine. I never got the chance to get this thing running until yesterday, and I bought this thing off ebay months ago. Im thinking its either something with the cpu, psu, or bios chip.

Yea, it could be any of those. Keep me posted by updating this thread, and I will do some research and see if I can come up with any possible solutions. That is strange!!!

 

[Skiing Squirrel]

yea it is... Im thinking its the bios chip. Ive never worked with dual cpus before or anything remotely like this chipset.

 

[Skiing Squirrel]

...Just wondering, but has anyone else had this problem? thanks.