system error help!!!!

nicc

Solid State Member
Messages
7
hello, my mums computer has gone funny, when she started it (xp Pro) her desktop was blank no icons, tool bars etc and an error message popped up something about not windows image, i tired to reinstall windows but it kept failing so she bought a new hard drive.

I have fitted this and tried to install windows but get this message;
ftdisk.sys is corrupted.

She now is ready to go out and buy a new computer but i would like to fix it does anyone know what the error could be.

Any help would be much appreciated.
 
Yeah, this will be caused by a bad RAM module.

It'll be some kind of memory leak causing things not to install right or work, and won't be the hard drive.

Do you know what sort of RAM will fit in that pc? SD Ram? DDR? at what speed? Sometimes if you open the PC up, it has it on the RAM chip.

I hope we can help
 
you should be able to put in the win disk, and, click repair...or some such thing
 
Yeah, but I've checked on the net, and people getting this error have tried many cd's/hard drives, and always got it.

Trust me when I say its a bad RAM module.
Hopefully you know what the computer uses. Or you could tell us the motherboard name? It should also be printed on it, and we can find what will be suitable for it.

How many RAM chips are also in the motherboard?
If you don't know what they look like, they should be these long chips that fit in these slots called DIMMS, and a computer might have 2 or 4 of them depending. They are also held in by these brackets that move to secure it.

If theres two, you can do some mix and matching, taking one out and checking if it works, and then placing the other one in if this doesn't work and trying with that.

I know for one thing that it would have messed with the PC, so after getting it working, it might be best to do a full install of windows again, by formatting the hard drive.
 
thanks for all your replys, there are two memory mods inside not sure which type i will get her to check now.
 
Well you can easily take one out and try with one of them, and then try the other one. Its not likely both have gone! :)

Any idea which each module has in size? 128mb? 256? Should be fine with 128 for the time being, since you can then buy a duplicate one
 
she has had a look all it has on the stick is Samsung 139, SDRAM PC133.

Does it matter which slot the ram is in when only one stick of ram is in.
 
Nope, though I'd put it in the first slot.

Try each one at installing windows...or you could try booting, but the faulty ram might have corrupted it. Worth a try though.

Then try the other stick. You could then just buy another stick of PC133 speed RAM. is it a 128mb stick? When you start up the computer it should do a memory check, telling you how much memory is installed. Thats a way of checking.

You should be fine running Windows off 128mb of ram though for the time being as long as your not running many programs on it or anything
 
it has 512, she tried one that not work so she is now trying the other, its abit difficult explaining on the phone to her , she never even seen inside a computer till today.
 
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