Re: [Hampshire] [OT] Hardware Diagnosis

On Wednesday 06 February 2008 18:57:46 Rob Malpass wrote:
> Evening all
>
> I'm experiencing a couple of problems with what has up to now been my most
> stable of PCs. It does run XP but (as some of you will know) that's
> because I run some special software for the visually impaired which doesn't
> exist for Linux... yet.
>
> Anyways back to the plot, it's developed a strange error on boot. It
> either:
> 1) Says I have a disk read error and please Ctrl+Alt+Del. If I do this
> 3-4 times, hey presto - it boots up ok - no safe mode or anything.
> 2) Says I have a missing registry component. This is usually curtains on
> an XP box but again, a few soft reboots has (thus far) fixed it. Quite
> why this should be is beyond me.
>
> What I need really is a double check of my diagnosis (and yes - a backup is
> in progress).
>
> I'm thinking 1) above is caused by a flat CMOS battery. I've seen this
> exact same behaviour on a PC a while back - however in that case, the PC
> was ancient - some 8 years old - this is only 3 years old. Interestingly
> I went into the BIOS and it can still see all the drives - so I may be
> wrong about a flat battery.
>
> If not a flat battery, then it points to a faulty primary hard disk. The
> one in question is 40Gb PATA and has been in use for 3 years also. The
> odd thing is if it's an error on the disk, it's seemingly broken one
> moment, then fixed after a reboot - most odd.
>
> Do these conclusions seem sound or have I missed something obvious?
>
> Cheers
> Rob

I would start with the hard drive, if you know the manufacturer of the drive,
pop over to there web site and download a diagnostic disk (normally a
bootable floppy but will work from a bootable cd) and let it test your hard
drive. Also worth check the data cable on the hard disk and motherboard for
cable creep. Just unplug it and plug it back in again.

Tim