Re: Need some advice on a PC I built a while back...

FWIW back in January I had one of my servers start doing the same exact
thing. It would take an incredibly long time to boot. and do anything at all
from then on.

The server happened to be an HP server running NT server 4.0, but from the
time the system was started till the system was logged in and running, took
around 6 hours, no joke.

For a simple pop-up message from Symantec to pop-up and dissapear took
20min.

Thankfully we could access the shares on the drives without much problem at
all, but to do anything at the console itself? forget it. It drove us crazy
trying to figure it out.

But at least the users could access the shares on the server.

Oh, BTW, it was also our PDC, and our main file server.

We ran all the HP diagnostics and everything passed with flying colors.

In the end we ended up transferring all the shares and functions to another
server.

Only after 2 months of work moving all the functions to other servers, did I
have the luxurey of digging into the server to find out WTF.

In the end, the fix was simple. (this is actually one of the original field
service rules, the more difficult the problem is to solve, the simpler the
ultimate fix will be)

While booting the server for about the gazillionth time, during the post,
the system reported the DIMM in slot 1 was a HP DIMM, but it reported the
DIMM in slot 2 as being a non-HP DIMM.

Switched the DIMMs and the error followed. Hmmm. Both DIMMs are clearly
marked as HP, but......

Took out the 'Non-HP' DIMM, and the system booted just fine and dandy thank
you very much.........

go figure....

so, your problem may be a bad stick of ram somewhere...?


<cmgray74@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1149013887.662982.4150@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi all,
I built a machine just before I graduated from college (BS - CS major
8/98). The motherboard is a Tyan Tiger (Dual Processor - Currently only
has a single 733MHz PIII processor - slot one in it), has I believe
512 megs of ram(will have to check when I get home but more then likely
it is more), 40 GIg HD, 32 Matrox G400, Network card, CDRW Drive, DVD
Drive and its currently running WinXP (that will changing).

This machine was my main machine up to about a year or so ago, as I
started using my faster newer laptop, and it basically got set aside
and used occasionally. Well I recently moved and was setting up my
office and I went to boot it up and it takes a incredibly long time to
load. I am not talking 10 minutes to load. I am talking (no joke I did
this) I can take a shower and get dressed and its still not fully
loaded. The windows screen is there but not ready to be used. It will
load, I have left it sit and run a while, while I was at work. When its
up and running the mouse icon and everything seems to function normally
but to address any kind of files and such, forget it, it takes a few
minutes (no joke) to open just a folder with 2 files in it.

So my delima, this machine has a few files that I need to get off it,
nothing super life and death as I back up occasionally. I have a
external DVD and a 120 Gig HD, so I am going to try and remove the
necessary files and quaranteen them just in case its not a hardware
issue. Replace a drive with one I have laying around and see it that
changes anything.

The machine seems to come up fine, no post beeps, the only thing I hear
every few minutes is a beeping noise coming from the Hard drive, so I
am pretty sure the HD going out, just the reason for long file access.

I plan to put Dual 933 MHz or 1 GHz in the machine and max out the
memory for a Linux play box but I am unsure if I should proceed or just
replace.

So my questions;

1) Has anyone seen this kind of scenario before?

2) How would you go about diagnosing/troubleshooting this issue?

3) If it is not the hard drive what parts can I say are most likely
good?

4) Crazy question- Would a power supply do this? The one in this unit
seems to work fine but I am grasping at straws here.


Thanks for the help,
Chris
SolomonMan



.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Changing Hardware Platform
    ... > driver structure then one finds that there are just a few IDE drivers. ... You can't expect PnP to solve your boot controller issue. ... Server 2003 at the moment much. ... >> can be lifted that way unless the controller, drives and Hotswap Chassis ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Problem with PC Server 500 System/390
    ... drive from the boot sequence. ... For more information on the system programs, ... F1 to enter Setup" line disappears but the server still boots from the C:\ ... as this could cause one of the RAID drives to become inaccessable. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware)
  • RE: RAID cfg. question
    ... way through the boot. ... I've resorted to installing 2003 Server on 2 new drives ... change the admin password, but not all of the workstations were logged into ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.general)
  • Re: Swing Migration from SBS 2003 to new SBS 2003 box
    ... W2K/XP workstations was to always preload all the boot device drivers in my ... whitebox with an MSI Athlon XP single CPU with IDE hard drives, ... Once I helped a customer with an OEM SBS installation on a Dell server ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Disaster recovery restore options
    ... you can take a drive image from on server and transfer it to ... The critical pieces are the HAL, boot controller, and video. ... In the production server, you take the production drives offline, and you ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)