The Lark

Hullo,

I've had this mysterious problem for a while now. I recently installed a new video card on my system and it ran just fine for a few days. Then I had a really bad lock up whilst at the desktop. Ive had this sort of recurring lock up even before the new card was installed, where if I opened windows explorer or a similar file viewer, the files would vanish as though the hard drive forgot where they were and the PC would hang for about 5 minutes... then it would find the files again. Anyway, this was a really bad lock up.

Afterwards, everything ran really slowly and tended to freeze a lot. Applications had serious trouble loading. When running music, it would stutter and go buggy if I did something so simple as open a new browser and I couldn't play games. In the end, I reformatted the whole system and it seemed to have worked for a while. Then the symptoms returned randomly after running Ccleaner (a bloat nuker). Funnily enough, I had run that before the last time it went funny, so I thought it was the cause. I reformatted again, but suffered another bad lock up whilst trying to load all my music into itunes. Again, same slow-down symptoms. The hard drive claimed to suffer write errors and made funny noises before I went for a third reformat.

The point is, I think its my Hard Drive that needs replacing. None of the symptoms seem card related even though the bulk of the problems occurred after its installation. All these issues are very obtuse and hard to pin down so its hard to come to any conclusions. Any thoughts?

Deleted090308

Hi

Sounds like you have a power problem.
Please post the system specifications - CPU, video, PSU etc.

Check the voltages with SensorsView.

The Lark

Well, I can't test it currently because my hard drive has no OS :P
My dad tried to divide it into 2 partitions and somehow interrupted the process. Now the HD thinks there's only 55 gig of unpartitioned space on what should be a 120 gig hard drive.

My specs are 1.8ghz e6300 cpu, 550 watt stock psu, p5ld2-se mobo, 4x-512mg 667 ram, 8800gts 512mg vga.

Ive been warned about the power supply, but reviews of the card seemed to show it never got close to hitting 550 watts under load. A lot of my issues happened at a desktop level, when the card should be idling. Still, its something I'll have a look at if I can repartition the HD properly.

The Lark

I just checked and the psu brand is SHAW.
Apparently thats bad.. ?

Tumbleweed36

That is very bad. Your power supply will not pull this 8800gts video card and perform properly.

You need at least a 650 watt power supply and be sure to get a good brand name. Here is a list of great power supplies:

Seasonic - any model
Corsair - any model
Thermaltake - "Toughpower" series only
Coolermaster - "Real Power Pro" series only
PC Power & Cooling - any model
Silverstone - any model

The Lark

ok, and would you know how I can fix the partition issue on my hard drive? Should I simply format the apparent 55 gig and put on windows or something so I can format again and try to recover the 120gig?

Tumbleweed36

If this were mine, I would download and run the manufacturer's utility and test it against the drive to see what it says about the health of the drive. This utility will test it even without an OS on it. Use another computer to download it and away you should go to test it on your rig.

If you purchased it as a retail drive (I don't know the brand name of your drive since I didn't see it mentioned), then there might be a disk already with the original drive that you have. Otherwise, go to the website and download the free utility.

It is quite possible that your hard drive problems are coming from a lack of power to it from the weak power supply. Stranger things have happened with a bum power supply.

Post back with what you find out from the utility.

The Lark

I tried running the utility (it was Toshiba by the way) and it couldn't seem to recognize it as a Toshiba product. Also, my friend brought a lynux CD and using that the drive came up as 89 gig and refused to partition under any file format. I went out and bought a Western Digital 500 gig SATA and I'm currently putting windows under a decent 130 gig partition.
Unfortunately, the XP cd doesn't seem to recognize the total 500 gig so I'll use the lynux cd to partition the rest later. If that doesn't work I'll be mighty pissed.

Also, I've switched the 8800gts out for a 7600gt *cries* until I can get a better power supply. Hopefully this will clear up my issues. Hopefully....

The Lark

Er... extra problem. After installing windows on the 130 gig partition I used lynux to format the extra space. I selected "primary partition" for that, and did not overwrite the partition where I put windows. Now I get Unmountable Boot Volume when I try to load windows. Should I go back into lynux and format it as "extended partition" so I can have the extra space? Have i just killed the new hard drive?

The Lark

okay, I got the extra partition working and windows is happy so hopefully everything will be fine. I shouldn't have any more queries unless I have random errors and slowdowns again.

Tumbleweed36

Glad you got it up and going. These things can be a real pain, but sometimes, it comes out O.k. Have a nice week.