[Demorve]

I have been having a problem with windows for about a week now. I believe my hard drive was beginning to fail so I ran checkdisk to check the hd surface, but the report had no errors in it. Then I started to get random crashes, freezes and stange noises. Since my hd is around 4 years old I figured I would replace it anyway. Now for the stange things.

I partioned my new hd for 50 gig for windows and 30 gig for linux. I placed my windows installation disk in and the mother board sees the disk and then starts the determining the system configuration part. At that point the system locks up and won't do anything else. I've let it do this for over 30 minutes but nothing changes. I turn my computer off and then insert my linux dvd. The computer see's the linux disk and the proceeds to install. This worked once for the new drive and then I put the windows cd in and then it was recognized. I aborted the installation and placed my old hd back in. I reinstalled linux and then did a windows repair. Once it was repaired it took a very long time for windows to load. The reason I wanted my old drive to work was so I could save some emails and other misc. files that I haven't archived yet. Well windows works but I couldn't access my wireless network so I could back them up to some networked storage drives I have.

Thinking that I had solved the booting from the windows cd problem I proceeded to reformat my new drive and wipe out the linux installation and start from scratch. The windows cd got stuck at the system configuration part again so I tried to install linux again and the dvd is seen and starts the installation part, but when it gets to the part where it determines what's in my system I get an error message under the software part saying "media not recognized". I have two dvd writers and the same thing happens to both.

One more thing the system bios takes a very long time to recognize my old hd, but only a couple of seconds with the new hd.

Any thoughts?

System Specs:
MSI socket 939 motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ cpu
1 gig kingston memory (2 X 512 dual channel)
BFG 6800 OC graphics card
Pioneer DVD-R writer
Generic DVD+-r\rw dual layer writer
Old hd 4 year old 80 gig maxtor
new hd 80 gig maxtor
120 gig maxtor drive used as a secondary drive(primarily used for programs)
Dlink wireless network adapter
Audugy 2 sound card

Thanks,
Demorve

 

[dai]

try it with 1 stick of ram,if no good try with the other one

 

[Demorve]

Tried that and no change.

A little later I tried to install linux and succeeded. I was then able to install windows but it still acted a little strange. When it started to boot up the windows page with the moving blue bar would be dim at first and then get brighter. after a few seconds it would be at normal brightness. I then decided to reinstall linux again, because linux wouldn't load, and now it won't work at all.

One thing I forgot to mention was a couple of days ago I had a major crash with strange noises and all. It was late so I turned off the computer for the night. When I started the computer the next day all my bios setting were messed up and I had to go into the bios and reset everything.

I'm beginning to think that my bios got corrupted or my motherboard is failing. I'm going to flash my bios later and if that doesn't work I'll try replacing my motherboard.

I would welcome anybodys insight on the matter no matter how improbable.

 

[dai]

you have probably trashed the mbr,one of the linux people is the best to advise as linux plus windows is not straight forward install

 

[Demorve]

The problem has been resolved. I flashed my bios and now everything works just great. Somehow my bios got corrupted and wouldn't let me do much of anything. I was wondering how the Resolved statement get's inserted into the threads title?