Having issues with my old desktop

imxelite

Baseband Member
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I thought my hard drive was dead because it can't freezing the computer and randomly giving disk boot failure error when booting. So I brought a new case because my old one sucked and got a new hard drive sata (old one was ide). Problem is now when I load vista onto the machine I keep getting BSOD errors. They range from memory dump to cache errors and page faults. Now all of a sudden I'm getting disk boot failure when I try to start the computer. At first I thought it was my video card but now I think the motherboard or memory maybe bad. What should I try next?


PC specs:
Abit An-m2 motherboard
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 tb - hard drive
2gb ddr2 PNY memory
Nvida 7600GT video card
AMD 5000+ x2 CPU


I was thinking of cutting my loses and buying a new motherboard and switching to DDR3 memory. My question is what would be the best motherboard that could handle my old x2 processor as well as being able to upgrade to quad core.
 
1. take the video card out and use onboard VGA, see if the problem stops.

2. if it doesnt, take 1 RAM stick out, see if it stops.

3. if not, put that stick back in and take the other out.

if it still happens after all these, its the mobo or HDD.

also, your current CPU is Socket AM2 i believe, the newer Athlon/Phenom II X4 CPUs use AM3 so you wouldnt be able to get a board with 5000+ support AND compatibility with newer quads.
 
Thanks for the quick response. I tried all the steps and the computer still gives boot drive failure.
 
Try putting your F3 on a different power connect, and try and different SATA cable if you have one. Otherwise, it could be a problem with the SATA input on your mobo, try a different plug.

if everything is fine in terms of cabling, plugs and power then it seems your HDD may be failing. The F3 spinpoint HDDs are well built imo, so i'd deem it unusual unless it has recieved some form of physical shock damage.
 
I tried switching power cable and sata cable with no luck. My dvd writer is a sata and works fine and when I put my old hard drive in it boots up. It does seem like the F3 just died because I can't seem to get anything out of it.
 
Ok weirdest thing happened. I started the computer from the vista cd and was giving the option of reformatting the hard drive. I'm doing it now but I have no idea why it wouldn't see it while booting but I'm able to reformat it.
 
The computer was seeing the drive for the past two days. It just kept BSOD and restarting every time I tried to install software. Then all of a sudden it started giving the disk boot failure. I'm going to try and install vista once more before returning to newegg.com for an exchange. I've only had this drive for less than a week.

I do think it's something wrong with the motherboard because I received this error with my old hard drive which I thought was dying.
 
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