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

[cmgray74]

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

 

[JAD]

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

Load last known good configuration from F8 at start up....or safe mode to
look at the event log.
XP was activated properly and you haven't changed anything?
If its sat for a long time I would pull the memory modules and PCI cards to
clean the contacts.
Slot 1 type CPUs are more susceptible to coming loose and getting dirty.
A PSU problem I don't think so, it may manifest a problem later after some
more use, but for now I think its a hardware quirk.

 

[John Weiss]

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.

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?

Yes, but it turned out to be a severely fragmented HD...

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

Since you moved it, I'd check and reseat ALL connections and cards inside the
case, and clean it out while you're at it.

If that doesn't work, pull out the HD and put it in an external USB/Firewire
enclosure or as a slave drive on another machine. If you can retrieve your
data, you may only need to repartition and reformat the HD. You might also
invest in Spinrite (www.grc.com) to try to resurrect it.

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

Good or bad?

Check the BIOS battery and ensure your BIOS setup is OK (hasn't reverted to
defaults).

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.

Will it spin up a CD and boot from CD? If so, it's not likely to be the
culprit.

If you find it is a bad HD, buy another cheap one and continue your upgrade
plans.

 

[hdrdtd]

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...?

 

[johns]

I built a machine just before I graduated from college (BS - CS major
8/98).

I see it all the time ... especially from the CS and Engineering
majors Bet a buck that's a Maxtor 40 gig with bad spots
on the disk. It is caused by leaving the machine on and letting
it fill to the brim with dust .. and heat. There's no fix for that.
Also, that dual processor mobo was made broke. The
problem as I see it is the hype about dual Opterons, Xeons,
on and on ... as good ( CS major ) machines. The fix is
to build a top gaming box, and get back on track with the
state of the art ... like Sun Microsystems did in their server
line.

johns

 

[cmgray74]

John,
nailed the drive type and size on the head.

I was able to pull the data off the machine by a USB External HD. I am
going to pull all the cards and memory, clean and reseat them. I picked
up another 40 Gig rreasonable from a friend so the drive issue is no
longer. I'll replace the data cable and I am going to probably replace
the memory in the next two weeks once I know the motherboard is ok.

Thanks for the help and I will keep you all posted.

Chris
SolomonMan

 

[Clint]

And was the bad drive a Maxtor?

Clint

John,
nailed the drive type and size on the head.

I was able to pull the data off the machine by a USB External HD. I am
going to pull all the cards and memory, clean and reseat them. I picked
up another 40 Gig rreasonable from a friend so the drive issue is no
longer. I'll replace the data cable and I am going to probably replace
the memory in the next two weeks once I know the motherboard is ok.

Thanks for the help and I will keep you all posted.

Chris
SolomonMan

 

[cmgray74]

Yes the drive was a Maxtor.

And was the bad drive a Maxtor?

Clint

 

[JAD]

John,
nailed the drive type and size on the head.


I was able to pull the data off the machine by a USB External HD. I am
going to pull all the cards and memory, clean and reseat them. I picked
up another 40 Gig rreasonable from a friend so the drive issue is no
longer.

How do you know anything is wrong with it? Hard drives don't beep.


I'll replace the data cable and I am going to probably replace

 

[cmgray74]

Not a exactly beep, you know the ever scary skip,beep,jug type sound.
Not good.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[cmgray74]

All,
After some playing around and replacing the drive I noticed that the
ram was not always reading the same amount on post. So I removed ram
and put only one 128 in and things seemed better/faster? Thinking thats
different I removed that one and put in the other ram module and it
just beeped. So I removed the ram again and reseated the module and the
motherboard just beeped. So I put the good module in and another I had
laying around and started it up and it came up to 256meg at every post.
I installed windows XP on a new drive that was "low leveled/zeros" and
checked with Maxblast and the other Maxtor Max utility. I left it with
it installed and up to the windows screen which loaded in the normal
expected time. I think I will run it a few days and see what happens.
If all is good I will do a upgrade to faster Dual 1GHz processor and
more memory and make it a dual boot Linux\Windows Box.

Thanks for the help and ideas,
Chris
SolomonMan