still freezes Help

[Guest]

Been working on a computer - did lots of system maintenance (scan disk,
defrag, disk cleanup, Norton and AdAware), but computer is still occasionally
freezing. Tried the Belarc site to check system components (for updating
drivers). Did try to update the chipset (an update to increase speed), but I
don't know if it took. We did not get to try any other driver updates, except
for what showed up on Windows Update. Before that, we had also reinstalled
Windows Xp and done critical updates. Any other ideas of what to check???
I'm not too sure on the chipset driver updates as to what is really
necessary. I noticed some said for advanced users/programmers. Please help.
thank-you. Also, on error checking, when it did show errors, a lot of times
it said the first allocation unit was not valid and then it truncated it.
What is this??

 

[Babaganoosh]

On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 19:09:02 -0700, Barbara Z

Hello BarbaraZ.

I'm a system reseller/hardware repair specialist and I have seen the
problem you describe - although never with WinXP running the NTFS file
system (you are running NTFS??). I believe the message you're receiving
(first allocation unit is not valid....) is WinXP trying to tell you
that your hard drive is failing and bad sectors are being detected. The
first thing to do is backup any important data. After that's done, go to
the website of the company who manufactured your hard drive and look for
a hard drive diagnostic program in the 'downloads' area. Typically the
diagnostic program will load onto a bootable 3.5" floppy disk so you can
run it without booting to the hard drive. After it finishes, if it
finishes, you'll get an error printout that should tell you whether or
not the drive should be replaced - be sure to write down any codes as
the manufacturer will ask for those if the drive is under warranty.

Many hard drives have a three-year manufacturers' warranty - unless the
drive was installed in a name-brand system like Gateway, Dell, HP or
Compaq, in which case the drive probably only has a one-year warranty
from the computer reseller/manufacturer (e.g. Dell). Even if that's the
case, it still pays to check the warranty status at both the system
manufacturer's website and the hard drive manufacturer's site.....

Good Luck
BBG

 

[Guest]

Hi BBG -
I'm not at computer in question, but I'm pretty sure it is running FAT32,
not NTFS.
Last week, I ran the computer thru the Belarc Advisor (tells all about
computer hardware & software). It did say that the hard drive ST320410A s/n
3FG0GBRT, rev 3.34, SMART status: Healthy. I'm gonna look into the
diagnostics you talked about, also another post I saw to check the drive.
On previous error checking (this computer starts error checking almost every
single time) report, there were bad sectors. (? 32KB in bad sectors?? trying
to remember)
I thought the OS could work around those. The lady told me that yesterday
she got another memory dump, with other warnings about protecting Windows,
etc.
Any more ideas?? I'll be going to this person's house to work on it, so I
want a handful of ideas to try.
Thanks.