off topic: hardware advice

[Kenny Hitt]

Ok, here goes.
First, up until June 12, the laptop was a Windows only system.  I always ran
software speech, so I didn't have any feedback until the system reached the
desktop.
The computer has two problems which might or might not be related.  Both
problems are intermitent.  They occurr about every month to two months.
One problem, is sometimes the system will crash during a Windows shutdown.  
The system will start shutting down, but hang just before it powers off.  
When this happens, and I go ahead and press the off button, Windows will
run scandisk the next time I boot.  The system usually boots with
no problem.  That problem seems to occure after I've installed or uninstalled
software in Windows, so I've always thought it is a Windows problem.

Second problem:
When you power on the system, you hear the drive power up, BIOS prompts me 
for my password, and you hear the drive start to access.  However, the access
stops responding imediately, and won't boot.  When this happened in late 
April, I just left it until a friend came by to read the screen.  The message
on the screen said that Windows was booting in safe mode.  It hung just after
it printed that message.  If I power it off, and back on four or five times,
it will finally boot and the problem won't happen again for a month or two.
When it happened yesterday, I had a DOS floppy, so I booted up with it.
Unfortunately, I've been brain dead lately, so I didn't have a floppy with 
ASAP.  For the last two weeks, when I needed to boot to DOS, I've just run ASAP
from the Windows partition on drive C:.  When it failed this time, I booted with the DOS floppy, and tried to switch to drive C:.  The system just beeped at
me after I type the c: command.  Once again, powering it off and back on
finally got it to boot.  I now have a ASAP floppy for the next time!

          Kenny

On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 04:35:01PM -0500, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> Backup and wait a minute.
> What kind of a problem are
> you specifically referring to.
> Tell us exactly what happens and
> in what sircumstances if any particular ones.
> Greg
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 04:24:48PM -0500, Kenny Hitt wrote:
> > Hi, my laptop is having intermitent hardware failure.  When I used windows,
> > I thought it could be a bad driver.  Now that I have Linux installed, I know
> > for sure it is hardware.  Specifically, my hard drive.  My question is:
> > since I always hear the drive power up, is it more likely to be the controler,
> > or could it just be the hard drive.
> > 
> > When it happened this morning, I didn't have a DOS floppy with ASAP to varify
> > what message it displayed.  I've got one now for the next time it happens.
> > 
> > One other thing, after trying to boot 4 or 5 times, it came up with no
> > problem.  This behavior is consistant any time it happens.
> > 
> >           Kenny
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
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