bad HD causing insane slowness? (or something else?)

gdea73

umm, well I have this crap old Gateway G6-300 (PII 300), which had a really strange problem where it couldn't boot to a Windows 98 CD. (this was after I accidentally left it in a loop, boot to CD, reboot, repeat, etc). It would beep and display random CP437 text, smiley faces and all, and beep repeatedly...

well I took the motherboard from a similar Gateway, GP7-500 (Pentium III 500 MHz) and swapped out the HD and video card.

It was running OK until I got a random blue screen while installing video drivers, followed by HD failure (bad first block according to ScanDisk). (The disk had started making a "grind, click" noise which was rather loud, beforehand, so this wasn't a major surprise.)

I put in yet another new HD, and wiped it (4 random passes) with CopyWipe, which took forever but was successful. However, since I installed the drive, this thing has been slow as sht, the POST takes like 60 seconds to detect the drives.

but nonetheless I was able to install win98 on this new drive (even though BIOS interface and POST are still extremely slow)... when I boot though it takes like 5 minutes of a flashing cursor before it shows the splash screen. Anyway before I run into even more problems, I'm just wondering what to expect...

- HD's failing, trash it?
- bad PSU, trash it?
- overheating, throw out the entire thing because a fan, and a place to mount it, will cost twice its value?

I mean, as I said in my post in the Software section, i just got a ton of new old PCs, among them a few *stacks* of IDE hard disks. So if this one's dead, big deal. I actually got this from one of the stacks, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was junk...

nightice

Sounds like the hard drive and maybe memory, but if both of those went out at the same time the power supply could have caused it. Do you have dirty/unreliable power service in your neighborhood? Even if the PSU tests OK, if it has low tolerances for low or unreliable input voltages, it could cause all sorts of voltage fluctuations in the devices connected to it.

gdea73

Hm, thanks for the input.

I've tested the memory thoroughly before with memtest86+ in all my old PCs, using 1 stick at a time of whatever SDRAM I had, only 1 stick was bad, threw it out long ago.

Unfortunately, I'm guessing it's the PSU. The problem is, I can never be sure, because I don't have a multimeter, and it does work just fine.

The power service around here's just fine except for the rare outage due to storms. I don't think that's necessarily the cause... probably just an old PSU needs to bite the dust :X

noone

If it's the psu, you can repair the psu possibly (if you have lots of time and don't wanna bother blowing a few dollars for a working one). It's more than likely the capacitors in it.

gdea73

meh okay. no trust me, I can get one really cheaply... it's in terms of laziness about having to go buy something.

my only concern really was that there's no way for me to know these things for sure in the future... I should find a multimeter, I guess. But even that sounds like a pain to test with, etc.

gdea73

Actually, I forgot to add: does heat count? The only fan in this system is in the PSU. There's an opening for an 80mm fan but it seems too shallow to actually mount one. The Pentium III has a large heatsink but no fan...

stitch

What does SMART report? If there was a heat issue you should see an airflow alarm in SMART.

gdea73

hmm I don't know... I believe I have a smart reporting tool in my software archive that will open on win9x, but it never displayed anything on my Inspiron 5000 :(

and besides I don't know if this hard disk, a WD153BA, really has temperature control... and actually my point with heat was that it might be causing general slowness if the P3 was overheating, but I don't think so. I took out the metal plate where you could supposedly mount a fan, as an extra ventilation outlet, but it didn't really help.