SY-P4S-645DX DRAGON Ultra Problems???????????????????????????????

I built this computer about march of 2003. I have:
P4 2.53 gig cpu
SY-P4S-645DX DRAGON Ultra
512 ram
100 gig WD hd
ATI Radeon 9700 pro 128
Windows XP Pro all packs and updates.
now I have a problem that keeps happening. When I start up the comp
every 2 or 3 times if starts chkdisk. sometimes it finds no probs
sometimes it says files were missing or links to files are bad or bad
indexes. you know it flashs the problem so quick and goes to windows.
Well I have reinstalled windows 8 or 9 times. I have done Fat 32 and
NTFS. and I still get it. The last time I had to reinstall windows my
comp would start but nothing would execute when you clicked on it.
Any ideas? is it mobo? I dont know what else to do short of buying new
hardware.

 

I had that problem a few weeks ago. I had a Win98/Win XP Pro partition for
boot purposes on the same drive. One day out of the blue when it started,
the damn blue screen popped up and it proceeded to check the drives. Errors
found and fixed. Thought nothing of it. A week later had a friend over to
pull files from one of my hard drives (10 GB plus). I had shot down
properly the night before, positive. It took 5 hours to check 1 drive, and
that was 30 GB! Found numerous errors but didn't think too much about it.
Later that night the system was slow to open alternate drives when clicked
while using WinDVD. Like an ass I actually shut it down that night without
doing any backups. Mind you, I built this rig in Sep 2002 and really didn't
format the drives before mving them from my old system. Tried to boot next
day-started, blue screen, a bit of text, and she rebooted-endless loop.
Tried to reinstall XP over itself-either not enough space (plenty) or major
error. Yep, hard drive crashed. Even though I couldn't see or access
either partition with DOpus or Explorer, thank goodnedd for PC Inspector
File recovery-recoevred all my soon to be lost data. Hoepfully you're not
headed the same way. FWIW, it was a Maxtor drive, the other 30 GB is fine,
odd.
Bubba

 

So you think it the hard drive not a mobo or other hardware issue?? I
would really like my comp to work with out all these probs at some
point....lol.

 

Have you checked Win XP's event viewer for error logs?

Right click on "my computer"
Choose "manage"
Select "event viewer"
Choose "system"

May give a hint of where your problem may lie.....

 

I'd bet 90% that it is a bad hard drive. First of all, it has all
the hallmarks of a drive that's losing sectors. Try this...run
chkdsk manually, including surface scan. If you find bad sectors,
send the drive to WD for exchange. They are pretty good about it,
can turn it around fast.

Assuming that all the drivers, etc., are up to date, you've
really checked out your cables, etc., the certainty of it being
a wonky drive goes up to about 95% in my mind.

It is the most frequently-failing component of a good computer.
(Other than cheapo CPU fans.) After all, it has most of the moving
parts and as many bits and pieces on its controller as the motherboard!

Greg

 

Since the comp had been running since March with no ongoing problems,
it just may be an aging hard drive. Especially if you kicked the comp
lately.

For a newer system, I would vote for memory being more likely to be a
problem than a hard drive.

Recently, I installed 512Mb of budget memory in my Soyo Dragon Plus 2
mobo and it proceeded to trash my hard drive. All kinds of weird
problems occurred that looked like disk translation errors and bad
files but were actually data written to the hard drive that had been
corrupted by main memory. Proceeding in such a state loses you your
drive and you'de have to wipe it like I did.

You may want to borrow a stick of memory (better quality or a known
brand like Crucial, Corsair or Kingston and see if the problems don't
go away.

Bob