off topic: hardware advice

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi Kenny,

Ok, that's more to work with.
Your first problem seems to be pretty common
(at least in my experience).
Regarding your second and more serious problem,
if the hard drive doesn't make any unusal noises
I'd say it's your controller or bios.
By unusal noises, I mean something like 
grinding  sounds, or the spindel spinning up half way,
dying, and doing a full spin up again.
If you don't get any of thoes noises, then most likely,
it's not the hd.
One question that comes to mind is
if you've tried running fdisk from DOS?
Yes, I know you can't access your c: drive, but
I wanna see what fdisk has to say just the same.

If you're feeling couragious,
and if you have someone sighted that
can help you setup your bios again after it's been cleared,
then let me know, and I'll give you a debug/gdb script to run.
This script is better then loading setup defaults from cmos.
It's the equivalent of opening up your machine,
and yousing the cmos clearing jumper.
I once had a problem simular to yours on an
old 586 gateway machine.
Since I didn't remember where the jumper on that board was
for clearing the cmos, the script did the trick
by clearing the cmos, and thus fixing my problem.
Let me know if you want that script, and I'll dig it up.
Greg


On Sat, Jun 23, 2001 at 05:47:04PM -0500, Kenny Hitt wrote:
> 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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> 
> 
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