Should I Be Concerned?

[GZ023247]

Should I be concerned regarding this:

Bought a new 250gig hardrive as when I was starting my PC up problems were happening such as it would suddenly just freeze after a few mins of been turned on.

Went to install new hardrive and ok I admit, I did a quick format to start off with instead of a full format, which I have now done, but it has taken 4 attempts to load win xp onto it.

I know the XP disk is ok and I am lucky to have 2 different copies kicking about as during setup I had to swap the disks about as I got various messages advising certain files could not be loaded...even though I could clearly see them on the dvd drive!! Before you ask, both are genuine copies, so no files should be missing.

Usually installing seems to go without a hitch, but this has been a nightmare.

As its new, I have the option of returning this back to ebuyer but with xp now finally running as in a few hours ago slightly unsure what to do.

Any advice pelase? :saywhat:

[PhilEnfield]

From your description, I would be suspecting bad RAM as the possible cause.

If the drive completed a full format OK, but problems occured when installing XP, this can be a classic sign.

If you want to check out the drive, go to the manufacturers website and download the diagnostic utility .... my bet would be, it will pass with flying colours.

[GZ023247]

As I was getting no where with new drive I decided to install an old 30gig drive..........once again problems installing xp.

So, I decided to try a xp pro disk I have and everything so far seems to going ok.

Is it possible that my genuine xp disk may have developed faults...........as I have heard in the past of disks "losing" data?

[GZ023247]

erm, maybe the installation of xp pro on this old drive has not been great either as I plugged my usb key into my pc for the drivers and nothing showed, the pc did not detect the usb key................ho hum!! What a way to spend a day off work!

I am gona reinstall the new drive, take out the new crucial ram I inserted into the motherboard and try a reinstall of xp home. Lets see what happens!

[PhilEnfield]

A few points :

1. It's not impossible that your genuine XP pro disk is damaged, but this wouldn't be my first suspect.

2. If the XP Pro disk is old, it may not have USB2 support .... this came later with SP1/2

3. You mention installing new RAM .... what RAM did you add/replace ? .... are you sure it's compatible with your motherboard ? .... if unsure, post your Motherboard make/model and Crucial code for RAM used.

[GZ023247]

Oh I tell you, this is driving me crazy!! lol

Ok, I removed the new RAM I bought and windows xp home installed with no disk reading problems this time, on the new hardrive as well. So at this point everything was looking good.

My USB ports seemed to work as well as my USB stick was seen as soon as plugged it in.

Now, just to be on the safe side, I have not connected any printers / scanners etc and I also disconected the power cables for my other 2 internal hardrives, so the pc is simply running as on little as possible for the momment.

Now after downloading a few updates from the microsoft site I noticed the pc was not comfortable with certain things, for example the media player kept freezing and a few times now I have seen the message on my monitor advising "so signal"....then the desktop sometimes reapppears, sometimes the pc just restarts.

I have also had a couple of times a blue screen with an error message and it states its doing a physical memory dump!! Doesn't sound great!

I had bought a new graphics card last week thinking at that time my oc was not over happy with the present one, however my new one is PCI-E, and I think (as I am unsure) my present one is either AGP or PCI.

My motherboard is a ASUS P4S800 ACPI.

The new RAM I bought is CRUCIAL, 1GB, DDR, 333 CL2.5.......dont know if this helps??

I appreciate your help on this, and if you can spare the time could you advise as to what graphics card this motherboard takes as I dont want to mess up again......its all costing me a fortune!!!

[GZ023247]

I think I could use a PCI or AGP 8x (1.5) graphics card in this pc?

[PhilEnfield]

Yep an AGP Card is what you need, the PCI-E ones will not work on your mobo.

A few questions :

1. How much Ram is in the system now ?

2. What CPU is this ...a Pentium 4 or a Celeron

3. The Ram you purchased is the correct type, but did you mix it with existing stuff ?.... if so what was the original ?

[GZ023247]

Okey dokey here we go,

Right, the RAM installed at present totalls to 1gig, it has x2 512mb sticks installed.
x1 stick is a PMI DDR-400 512mb 3208GATA11-04A1
X1 stick is a Crucial 512mb 184-PIN DIMM 64Mx64 DDR

The 512mb of crucial ram was added a couple of years back to give it a boost!!

The other stick I wanted to install was 1gig of crucial ram 184-PIN DIMM 128Mx64 DDR.....but is now sitting at the side.

I am beginning to think the new ram bought may not cause problems, since I am still having them, but then again why did the xp disk install this time once the ram was removed, maybe just luck!!

Its also a Pentium 4 cpu thats running in it.

Thanks again.

[GZ023247]

As I seem to have a spare PCI slot, would you recommend a PCI card, or an AGP graphics card?

[PhilEnfield]

Try removing the old Ram and fitting the new Ram instead and see if this improves things.

A VGA card will be your best bet.

[backup2k1]

problem could be faulty ram when window tries to use the ram on the machine.
the other problem we have come across is that the hard drive ram on the pcb has gone faulty.
so this would give errors or blue screen of death

[GZ023247]

Well,
Finally things are starting to look up a bit, so many thanks for your advice and suggestions.
The graphics card was changed and this has resulted in no more "no signal" monitor screen messages.
The ram - all of it - finally is all in without the pc crasing or not starting up. It was a method of putting only the new 1gig stick in, checking to see if it worked ok - which it did - then updating the bios and then adding the rest of the ram. Never updated BIOS before, so that was fun and after a few attempts of actually getting the pc to read the floppy disk it worked out ok and all the ram is installed.

Now the system seems to be very stable, ran a program that kept crashing the machine and its run the program twice now with no problems.

HOWEVER!!!! lol......there is always something eh! The pc although stable and does what is been asked seems to be running really slow. For example, before I could unrar a 4gig image file in about 5 mins BUT now we are talking about 15mins!! And it doesnt matter if I am unraring the file to the same hardrive the original file is on or another hardrive, the time it takes is still the same!

One thing I had thought of, but wanted opinions on it, is could it be the the position I have the wee black plastic cover thing on the back of the hardrive that selects it to be either slave / master etc? I was under the impression I had put it to master similar to the previous hardrive that was in it, but i could be wrong.

Any ideas please? :bawling:

[PhilEnfield]

The jumper should be set to Master for your main drive, containing the OS, so that wouldn't affect things.

It might be worth grabbing the latest version of WinRar, if you haven't already (3.71 I think).

Is this the only performance issue ? or have you found anything else slow ?

[GZ023247]

Yesterday I transfered 2 image files, both about 4gig in size from the new hardrive (that has the o/s on it) to another internal drive.

Ususally I have found this can take about 5 mins or so when doing this before in the past. However, yesterday it advised me when the files were been transfered that "time left" was 32mins!

So, with this is mind I kind of think its a bit more than the WINRAR program. If the black cover thing I mentioned before is wrong would that slow it up? I presume I could restart the pc and somehow pause the first page when the pc starts up to see which order the pc see the drives? :suspic:

[PhilEnfield]

Did you actually check how long it took, as Windows time estimates are often way out.

The jumpers are ok, this wouldn't affect performance ... if these were wrong you wouldn't be booting.

A few things you could try .... :

If you have both Hard Drives on the same IDE channel, try moving the data drive to the Secondary channel. If you have other optical drives, you may need to reconfigure the jumpers accordingly.

Check that your master (OS) drive, is fitted to the end (not middle) connector of the IDE cable, on the Primary channel.
Check you have 80 conductor ribbon cable(s) not 40

Defrag the old (data) drive.

and finally check in Device Mangler/IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers that neither of the drives have reverted to PIO Mode and are set to DMA

[GZ023247]

Thanks for your reply, here is the result.
I decided to try the last option mentioned first before having to unplug everything on the pc and open it up again and here is the result:
When in device manager and clicking the IDE ATA/ATAPI the following is shown:
PRIMARY IDE CHANNEL
SECONDARY IDE CHANNEL
SIS PCI IDE CONTROLLER

When I go to the properties of PRIMARY IDE CHANNEL the "general" box shows:
DEVICE TYPE: IDE ATA/ATAPI CONROLLERS
LOCATION: PRIMARY CHANNEL

The "Advanced Settings" box displays the following:
DEVICE 0
DEVICE TYPE: AUTO DETECTION
TRANSFER MODE: DMA IF AVAILABLE
CURRENT TRANSFER MODE: PIO MODE

DEVICE 1
DEVICE TYPE: AUTI DETECTION
TRANSFER MODE: DMA IF AVAILABLE
CURRENT TRANSFER MODE: ULTRA DMA MODE 5

Now I noticed "Device 0" states current transfer mode is PIO mode - and if I am right reading your above comment you have suggested this should be DMA. However, there seems to be no drop down box on the "current transfer mode" to select DMA???

If this helps at all, the secondary IDE channel states that the current transfer mode for Device 0 and also Device 1 is Ultra DMA mode 2.

So the word DMA is shown in 3 cases, and PIO in one case.

Is this the reason for problem I have?

[GZ023247]

Also just wanted to add, the bloke I spoke with on the phone from the pc shop asked me to give him details of my cpu usage and stuff, he said that all seemed fine and he said it could be related to a bad install of windows xp??

[PhilEnfield]

Yep ... it looks like your Primary Master is set to PIO Mode, which would account for the slowness.

Go back to Device Manager/IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, right click the Primary Channel and select "Uninstall" click APPLY/OK and reboot the PC.
When Windows reboots, it will reinstall the IDE Controller automatically and redetect & reinstall any drives. If it's a Windows glitch, this will flush it out.

Now go back to Device Manger/IDE ATA/ATAPI and check if the device is now set to DMA.

If so ... check your speeds again and they should be back to normal.

[GZ023247]

:luxhello: Woohoo!!!

Well, after doing what you advised with the removal of the IDE device and restarting the pc, it is showing a transfer method of DMA now....no longer PIO!!

And I transfered the 2 files that I did previous, and it took 5 mins....which is more like the speed I was expecting.

So, fingers crossed this is now all sorted and running as well as it can be.

Just wanted to say a big thanks for all your help on this Phil mate, top fella!!
:cheers:

[PhilEnfield]

You're welcome m8y .... glad it helped :)