Hello,
A week ago my computer started to hang at random times and spontaneously restart. Everytime it did this, upon restart the BIOS would not find the hard disk. I had to turn the power supply off and on, restart the computer then it would find the hard disk and boot up fine. Later, it would hang again, restart and this cycle continued. I noticed that seemed to hang more often when installing programs or burning a CD.
Virus check came up clean. I formatted everything, did fdisk/mbr because I thought I may have missed a boot sector virus, flashed the BIOS, and reinstalled XP. It took 5 tries to install XP because the installation would fail in mid process and setup files could not be copied properly. When this happened, I had to restart and again the BIOS couldn't find the hard disk unless I swithed the power supply switch on and off and restarted. Finally, XP installed and the computer boots up fine. But, now when I try to install SP2 it hangs, and restarts again and the BIOS again can't find the HDD unless I cycle power. (I also noticed that by unplugging just the power to the HDD and plugging it back in I can get the BIOS to find the HDD)
It seems to me as though the computer spontaneously loses contact with the hard drive during installations or CD-writing etc... I am unsure if it is a HDD problem or a motherboard/BIOS problem or something else. I don't know what is going on but I can't install programs and I feel like the computer may lose the HDD at any moment.
My computer has never had any problems of any kind. It's about 5 years old.
Do you guys have any ideas what the problem may be?
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
My system specs:
MOBO: Asus P4T, 256MB Cache
BIOS: Award 1007
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 1.8MHz
RAM: 512MB Rambus 2x256
HDD: WD 100Gb 7200RPM
Power Supply: 400W generic
Video: ELSA Gladiac 920 64MB
A week ago my computer started to hang at random times and spontaneously restart. Everytime it did this, upon restart the BIOS would not find the hard disk. I had to turn the power supply off and on, restart the computer then it would find the hard disk and boot up fine. Later, it would hang again, restart and this cycle continued. I noticed that seemed to hang more often when installing programs or burning a CD.
Virus check came up clean. I formatted everything, did fdisk/mbr because I thought I may have missed a boot sector virus, flashed the BIOS, and reinstalled XP. It took 5 tries to install XP because the installation would fail in mid process and setup files could not be copied properly. When this happened, I had to restart and again the BIOS couldn't find the hard disk unless I swithed the power supply switch on and off and restarted. Finally, XP installed and the computer boots up fine. But, now when I try to install SP2 it hangs, and restarts again and the BIOS again can't find the HDD unless I cycle power. (I also noticed that by unplugging just the power to the HDD and plugging it back in I can get the BIOS to find the HDD)
It seems to me as though the computer spontaneously loses contact with the hard drive during installations or CD-writing etc... I am unsure if it is a HDD problem or a motherboard/BIOS problem or something else. I don't know what is going on but I can't install programs and I feel like the computer may lose the HDD at any moment.
My computer has never had any problems of any kind. It's about 5 years old.
Do you guys have any ideas what the problem may be?
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
My system specs:
MOBO: Asus P4T, 256MB Cache
BIOS: Award 1007
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 1.8MHz
RAM: 512MB Rambus 2x256
HDD: WD 100Gb 7200RPM
Power Supply: 400W generic
Video: ELSA Gladiac 920 64MB