PC On Last Legs? Advice needed

stakey

Hi all,

Was home this week to my parents house and my old PC, a PII 266, 128 Ram, 4 Gig HD (yup, its old) has become a little unstable to say the least.

Its running windows 98 and while my father is typing or emailing it often locks up claiming it cant write to the HD.

Sometimes the HD isnt found at boot and sometimes when it is found, the drive makes scarily loud noises.

Then sometimes it goes days without a problem.

Its my opinion that the drive is on the way out... for that reason it was a slave on my machine for 30 minutes as i copied all of his important stuff on to my computer.

I also found out my younger sister had taken the last 1.8 gigs on the machine for the Sims, leaving 400 mb of HD space.

So do folks think
- the HD is just about dead
- the sims use of 25% of the hd space was causing chaos on the drive
- nothing a good reinstall of windows 98 wouldnt fix


also (just in case)

can anyone remember what the max size hd windows 98 supported was?

and for that matter does anyone have a full licensed legal copy of windows 98 they want to offload hanging about?

Virus_Inc

win98 = fat32 = theoretically you can format to 2Tb but I can't see anyone doing that
Have win98 licences lying about if you want one...

test999

I'd guess the drive is about to give up the ghost, or a dodgy cable?

You could try saving the sims save games and then uninstalling it, to see if things improve.

Failing that, as you have already backed the drive up, you could do a reinstall of windows or a free version of linux to see if the problems are hardware related.
HTH

gamer

that drive is on the way out ,just get ready to buy a new drive,if it was ur own pc id say reformat reinstall windows and see what happens but since other people using it thats not practical but if u have spare hd u cud install win98 on it and have it ready ,install antivirus firewall etc spybot adaware etc

Capt'n Midnight

Noises ending in -g are OK
Those ending in -K are bad news
- ball bearing dropping noises are terminal - backup immediatley (head crash soon)

Instead of reinstalling...
So you could put in a second HDD - and use LCOPY in dos mode to just copy all the files over. Then SYS the second drive. Then swap the drives. If the new drive does not boot then use FDISK to make sure the partition is set active etc.

http://www.odi.ch/prog/lfn/index.php

stakey

hi all, thanks for the advice thus far, so far i have

backed up all the data to my drive on my pc

I unistalled sims

I took the slave cd rom off the cable and gave it its own cable, hd is now on its own on a new cable

win 98 updated driver settings after rebooting machine, seemed to run okay for twenty minutes booted down, had to go to college

interestingly the pc was running only

word, sims, firefox and foxmail

with AVG,Adaware & Spybot installed just in case

anyway

as a precaution::

could i use this hard drive
40 gb 3.5" IDE
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=116435&cks=PRL

on a pII 266 MMX, w/128MB RAM, MOBO Unknown

Virus_INC i might take you up on that offer of a win98 license if things go down hill any more

i have a windows 98 disk but i think it was dodgy, friend of a friend of a friend type thing

thanks again for your input folks

Virus_Inc

Can't see why not - have formatted drives over 80Gb with Fat32, and you shouldnt run into any space issues as ATA33/66 will support up to 120Gb... I have seen older mobos not being able to detect large capacity hdds (like 80Gb) but this can usually be solved if there is a relavant BIOS update available...

Gerry

My advice is to purchase a second hand 20gig drive ( won't cost very much, have a look on forsale, or put up a wanted ad ), then install win2k.
Win2k will run ok with 128mb of ram, especially after turning off unecessary services.

Blub2k4

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Noises ending in -g are OK
Those ending in -K are bad news
- ball bearing dropping noises are terminal - backup immediatley (head crash soon)http://www.odi.ch/prog/lfn/index.php

You are being humorous right?
Sounds like AOL helpline advice.

Gilgamesh

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Noises ending in -g are OK
Those ending in -K are bad news
- ball bearing dropping noises are terminal - backup immediatley (head crash soon)

Instead of reinstalling...
So you could put in a second HDD - and use LCOPY in dos mode to just copy all the files over. Then SYS the second drive. Then swap the drives. If the new drive does not boot then use FDISK to make sure the partition is set active etc.

http://www.odi.ch/prog/lfn/index.php

I have never heard a HDD making a noise with a -g

The head crash thing sounds like me after a long night out, :eek:

I would recommend Seatools from Seagate, works with non seagate products aswell

http://download.seagate.com/seatools/registration.nsf/desktop?openform

RicardoSmith

Any drive that starts making noises after not doing so for a couple of years in usually about to die. With HD so cheap I don't see the point of buying a second hand one myself.

Capt'n Midnight

Blub2k4 wrote:

You are being humorous right?
Sounds like AOL helpline advice.

More to do with the sharpness of the sound

Chugg Chugg - like some of the old scsi drives

Clunk, Click, Clank, Thunk, Ke-dunk, ClickClikClik

Head crash is where the head can't initilise and goes hunting across the drive till it burns the head motor or something like that - it's not good

Inspector Gadget

Hmm...

I don't think it's possible to classify hard disk noises by how you'd spell the best match you can come up with in English :-)

Also, for what it's worth, "Head crash" is exactly what it sounds like - the read/write heads, that normally sit about the width of a human hair (or thereabouts) away from the platters they're reading/writing, collide with one or more sides of one or more platters like an aircraft with no landing gear, ploughing up a trough of the magnetic material coating those platters like a tractor (or a French concorde, in relative speed terms ). Usually caused by either servomotor failure, controller failure or a chunk of dust/debris getting stuck under the leading edge of the head, and always fatal to at least some of your data. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash for more on this, including a photo of the results of same - makes a nice lathe!

(I'm reminded of the fairly nasty-sounding "clunk" many old Quantums (Fireballs et al) used to make when they parked their heads - just as the computer was shutting down, that is...)

Dig out diagnostic tools, but if it's making loud noises of any kind, particularly the kind you can feel by resting a fingertip on the drive during "normal operation", get shot of it bloody quick, and take copies of anything of value ASAP.

Also, I have to disagree with Gerry on the second-hand hard disk front - I've had some (ok, lots of) really bad experiences with old drives that have been left idle for any length of time. Pick up a cheap (new) 20/40-gigger or something. On the subject of disk sizes, you've got the following limitations to play with:

1) Some (bloody old, pre-INT13) PCs won't recognise drives larger than 8.4GB - your computer shouldn't fall into this bracket.
2) Some computers won't recognise drives of larger than 32GB - your computer could well fall into this category, but it's far from certain. I've seen a number of drives that can be jumpered into a "compatability mode" that'll allow them to report themselves as 32GB, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you which ones - though I'm pretty sure the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7's do... Try to identify the make/model of the PC (if it's a big company jobbie like a Dell, Compaq, HP or IBM) or the motherboard (if not) and see what it says it can support.
3) I can't remember if this is the case with Win98 (it certainly is with later versions of Windows, so I suspect that it is), but there is a known issue with Windows installers that they calf if you try to get them to create FAT32 partitions of more than 32GB. They look like it's all rosy, then crunch (not in the "hardware go ouch!" sense, just that the install hangs and you have to start again). You can get around this by formatting the disk in a third-party application, but be aware of the existence of the problem.

Hope this helps,
Gadget