Re: Dell Dimension 2400 Problem

hslomer@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 16, 9:36 am, "William R. Walsh" <wm_wa...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi!

All of the Dell diagnostics run fine.
The owner did say that she keep turning the system on/off while
the power was fluctuating. The system has not worked since then.
It is very likely that the file system on the hard drive is now badly
corrupted. This is why Windows keeps crashing, and it might be bad
enough that Windows setup is crashing when it examines the hard drive.

It's not a great idea to leave a computer running when the power going
into it is unstable. This can put a lot of stress on the components.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to proceed from this point?
If any data on the hard drive is important, I'd remove it and
temporarily install another hard drive to see if you can install
Windows at that point. If you can, then it's definitely a corrupted
file system on the original hard drive.

You run the risk of having another computer blue screen, but if data
on the computer is important, the only way I see to get it off of
there would be to temporarily place the original drive in an external
enclosure (or connect it as a slave drive inside the working computer)
and hope that things aren't so messed up as to prevent any access to
the data.

Once you have the data off the drive--or if it isn't important/in need
of being saved--use a tool like DBAN to totally erase the drive. Then
you should be able to reinstall Windows without a hitch.

William

William,

Thanks for the reply!

Your solution was correct, the hard drive was the source of the
problem. I was able to recover by reformatting the drive in another
system. The install then went smoothly from that point.

I can now start to install the chipset, video, sound and network
drivers. I hope to find them on Dell's web site since the owner no
longer has the drivers or applications CDs.

Howard

Hold on here. Not too fast. The drive got corrupted for some reason, didn't it? Dell diagnostics and Microsoft's cheesy ScanDisk don't reveal 1/100 of what you need to know about the health of a hard drive. In my experience, most of the time hard drive corruption is caused by a partial failure of the drive hardware, for example, sectors of data going bad.

Strong recommendation:

1. Download HDAT2 and run it to examine the SMART data kept by the drive about its own health and well-being. HDAT2 neatly highlights problem areas in red. If any sectors have been replaced by spares, replace the drive, because it is unreliable.

2. Download the hard drive diagnostics for the drive from the manufacturer's web site. All major drive manufacturers except Toshiba have freely downloaded diagnostics which do a decent job of checking the entire drive.

If you do not want to take this recommendation, do not be surprised if the system gets BSODs again. You heard it here first... Ben Myers
.

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