What would cause this?

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

One of the radio station computers started acting up a week or two ago. Random freeze ups, slow downs, etc.

Today it quit altogether. I had to reboot the bios by removing the battery, then I found that it wouldn't boot up with both memory sticks installed. One of the sticks seems to be bad.

Once I got past that, I found that both hard drives were trashed.

I reformatted the old primary one, reinstalled XP Pro, and started upgrading the installation via the internet. Half way through SP2 it froze up and upon rebooting gave me "can't mount the hard drive" errors.

I removed that one, went to the old slave drive, reformatted it and installed the operating system onto it. Went to the internet and did a successful upgrade and, so far, it seems to be working okay.

So what would mess up the memory, trash 2 hard drives, and ruin one of them?

Or is all my work today just fooling myself and the 2nd hard drive's days are numbered too?

[Dave McClung]

I assume that when you say "memory stick" you are referring to the SIMM? That being the case, I would guess that the failure of the SIMM caused the other problems. It may have shorted out resulting is voltage spikes that trashed the hard drives.

That would be my wild guess.

Dave

[Hal Kreps]

Have had a similar problem. Turned out to be the controllers on the mother board. New mother board fixed problem without damage to drives.

[Jonathan Long]

Scott,

To me it sounds like a power supply/voltage problem. Are you running on a UPS and voltage filter?

If it was the logic boards hard drive controller it wouldn't have affected the memory...

I'd check the drives on a good known computer and I'd plan on replacing both drives anyway. Now days drives are cheap... It seems that once a hard drive experiences a voltage surge... they never fully recover.

You could save yourself the trouble next time and use Norton Ghost to copy the drives contents prior to any problems.

Jon

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

It is unlikely that the computer got a voltage surge. It is at a radio station where everything is double and triple protected, and the problem appears to be isolated to the machine.

When I removed the shorted out DIMM the computer started working up to speed again, although one of the hard drives seems to be totally gone.

I ran the machine quite a bit yesterday, and it did fairly good, but running with half memory in intensive sound processing work wasn't a good thing! I got way too many dropouts for air quality work.

Management has already ordered a replacement machine. So, we will be back to work fairly soon -- and I think this computer will make someone a nice desktop!



Scott,

To me it sounds like a power supply/voltage problem. Are you running on a UPS and voltage filter?

If it was the logic boards hard drive controller it wouldn't have affected the memory...

I'd check the drives on a good known computer and I'd plan on replacing both drives anyway. Now days drives are cheap... It seems that once a hard drive experiences a voltage surge... they never fully recover.

You could save yourself the trouble next time and use Norton Ghost to copy the drives contents prior to any problems.

Jon

[Jeff Howe]

A large percentage of problems where I work are caused by spyware, malware, grayware and the like. Is this machine used as a server or does it have admin use where people spend a fair amount of time on the internet?

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

Well the computer has been replaced and another put into service. However, that network is isolated from the Internet - strictly used for production and on the air. We have one network that has internet connect and the other that doesn't. That computer was never, so far as I know, in it's service ever connected to the internet!

A large percentage of problems where I work are caused by spyware, malware, grayware and the like. Is this machine used as a server or does it have admin use where people spend a fair amount of time on the internet?