Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello ladies.

My PC has recently been making extremely loud whirring noises, and been going a little slower than normal. I backed a few things up, but not everything I need, and today it seems to have had a bit of a moment. It stalled trying to open Firefox, and wouldn't respond to anything. I turned it off via holding down the power button for a bit, and gave the thing an hour to cool down and sort itself out.

Alas, upon turning it back on, it doesn't seem to be able to make it all the way to, well, anywhere. It pops up the first few lines of whatever, then goes to a black screen with a flashy prompt thing, and then instead of loading XP it either hangs or says "Disk Read Error, press CTRL+ALT+DLT to reset". I can't actually do this as I have a crappy Bluetooth keyboard that doesn't activate until Windows does (terrible, I know). So I reset via the reset button, and we're back at that nasty screen again.

Anyone got any ideas about how I might fix this? Or is it broken for good? If so, I guess I'll refer to Dimrill's "Buying a new PC" thread. I very much hope that even if it is broken beyond hope, I can perhaps rescue the hard disk, as it has a whole bundle of stuff on it that I didn't get around to backing up. Oops. I copied all of my writing to a flash drive, but my music and photos would be lost. Eek!

Anyway, thoughts?

Yours from the fiancee's laptop,

Curiosity

Sounds to me like a fucked hard drive. If you've backed up I wouldn't bother and just get a new one, hard drive problems are a time-consuming pain in the hole. But I may well be wrong, I'm probably the least techy person on here.

First: do nothing. Don't turn it on.

The loud noises are probably your hard drive. If it were the power supply, then the computer wouldn't be doing much of anything and there'd probably be smoke or something.

To see if it is the hard drive, take the case off and disconnect the power and data cables your hard drive. Then turn on the computer.

Without the hard drive, the computer should still be working enough to POST and beep at you about a missing system disk. At this point, you might be able to insert and boot into a Linux Live CD (like Ubuntu), which would allow you to see if the memory is knackered too. (As far as I know, memory will either fail all at once, and you'll get no booting, or it fails a little bit and booting into a complex application will show you whether that's the case.)

To restore your data: remove the hard drive, connect it to another computer somehow, and use Runtime GetDataBack on it.

If you can't do this, you'll have to go to a shop.

After that, you'll have to make a decision for what you're going to then do with the computer.

In my case, I didn't know whether it was the hard drive showing its age, the motherboard being cheap crap, the cables being loose or old or the power supply being crap. As a result, I figured it was all of the above: a crap PSU damaged my cheap motherboard and as a result my ancient hard drive malfunctioned. Time for a whole new computer.

What you absolutely cannot do is rely on that hard drive ever again. After you've got your files off it (and make sure that they've been retrieved correctly. Every file: yourself, manually.), copy the files to another hard drive and a stack of optical discs, then I'd say completely annihilate the broken hard drive. It is not a backup, even if you can get it to work again.

Hello I also have a computy problem.

Im trying to reformat my laptop (had it 18months and havent done it yet) and it for some reason won't let me do it. If I boot up with the vista disc it doesnt give me the option to format, and if I right click on c: drive then format it says it can't do it because windows is running from this drive...

What can I do to delete everything and start again?

Many thanks for the advice, MrD.

I tried to turn it on again before you posted that, and got a different error. This time it said "Failed to load operating system".

Not sure if that sheds any more light on the matter.

The vista boot CD should offer you the option to choose what partition you want to install it on. One of the options there should also be the ability to delete a partition. Delete the partition, create a new full-size partition, and then install Windows onto that. That effectively formats the drive, because it blows away the file allocation table.

Mine started working again, but wtill sounds bad.

Will buy new storage drive tomorrow and backup everything, then await next breakdown to buy new PC.

When my laptop had hard drive failure, I (with great effort) managed to duplicate it (which wasn't easy) onto the new hard drive so it was like nothing had changed... except it suddenly had an extra 20gb of hard drive space. Whoooo!

But yeah, don't use it until you've copied everything off... I lost everything once (and I'm sure I'm not alone here - my dad got DOS 6.0 and ran DoubleSpace...)

Yeah I found how to do it

Nice clean fast laptop again

If that was the hard drive it would be game over. It would run slow it just wouldn't run at all.

It sounds to me like one of the fans is failing and it's overheating (causing the slowdown).

I would check your fans. Make sure they're not clumped with dust, a paint brush is good for cleaning them out.

If it's the CPU fan then remove it and get all of the dust clumps out of the heatsink.

Of course it could also be fan bearing failure, easily fixed by replacing the fan.

Actually it could be the hard drive.. I didn't read the complete post (my bad). Noisy whirring sounds are usually fan failure though.

It depends on the nature of the noise. Just stick your head inside the case for a listen.

I reckon it might be largely fan-based, but one of the noises was a weird clicking which might have been the HD or something.

Stupid computer.

My Wacom graphics tablet driver decided to crash, and therefore stop working. This is the second time in as many weeks this has happened, so after my reboot I decided to update the driver. Sorted.

Except when I rebooted after that, my Windows Pen Flicks (gestures) had been disabled, and I can't seem to find any way of re-enabling them. Using a pen instead of a mouse, which is something I've become incredibly accustomed to over the last month or so, is a complete chore without them.

I've tried a system restore, which has reverted my driver back to the previous version, yet the Pen Flicks are still missing.

RAGE QUIT.

Scrap that. Reinstalling the new driver yet again, after reverting, seems to have sorted the problem.

Now, I wonder if I'll have to deal with this again next week when it decides to fuck about again.

Okay, thought there was another PC thread, but couldn't find it:

Okay, help needed, please.

My PC started playing up, and wouldn't start Windows properly, although Ubuntu worked okay. So I thought I would format my HD and reinstall Windows. First of all I got an old HD and put it in so I could transfer data I wanted to keep (porn) from one disc to another prior to format. While I was doing that, I thought I was doing that, I thought I would install Ubuntu onto this separate HD. So I formatted that HD and installed Ubuntu. All good so far, Ubuntu works. I go to format the other HD, but the PC won't start properly. It stalls at the BIOS screen, I keep trying and occasionally get past the BIOS screen, but not too much further. Getting pissed off I leave it over the last couple of days.

so, I come back and turn it on, and it is going "grrrrrrrrrrrrr", it sounds like one of the fans, the monitor is showing the AMD logo, but it is all squiggles and bright colours (like a fucked xbox) and a strange smell is present. It isn't the CPU fan, or the case fan, BIG EDIT:

It is the other fan on the MB (North bridge?) that is making the noise. I can't tell where the smell is coming from.

Basically, is it fucked?

I'd hazard a guess that it's the northbridge fan making the smell. If you're lucky, the northbridge itself isn't burnt yet, and the effects you're getting are just overheating. By a replacement fan - the internet should be your friend here, look for chipset fans. Worth a fiver punt before getting any more spendy. Just stop turning it on!

I think it may be dead now. I stripped it down and stuff, the North Bridge fan still works, but is noisy. I just have no output to the monitor now. The PC seems to start, lights come on and stuff, the computer whirrs and CD seems to kick in, but no output at all to the monitor, DVI or VGA. Would a dead NB affect video output?

A dead NB could affect almost anything; it depends what's in and connected to what. The Northbridge used to be the link between CPU, memory, PCI/bus and southbridge. I think the graphics, if built-in and not in the north/south bridge, would be linked to the north. It's all started changing the last few years though, and I've had almost nothing to do with it in that time so have forgotten most of what I knew.