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