Jenny and Inland - Need your help

Talked to Draclvr and she said to ask you about this. I did a diagnostics test on Bill's XP Dell computer and came up with these tests that failed. Seek, Read and Write. Do you have any thoughts. Could it be the hard drive? See my Avast post as to what happened.

Bets

Yes, those are hard drive tests.
How old is the hard drive and what type?
Some hard drives are only warrantied for one year.

If you can boot to it, back up everything you want to keep.

If you can't boot to it, you'll have to either boot from a boot disk or attach the drive to another computer to get the data off of it.

The computer was bough in 2001 and is a Dell 8200 The hard drive is a: 40GB,ATA-100,7200 RPM

Ye, I can boot up. Bill uses it for games and we just got internet back working on it again.

Would the Avast upgrade have anything to do with it? It was working fine up to that point.

It sounds like you could do with a replacement drive. I purchased a 1 Terabyte 7200 RPM Barracuda a few weeks back – Fry’s had them on sale for $40.00. If you've got one nearby, you might check to see if they still have them in stock.

Looks like Newegg has the same for a little bit more, but still not a bad buy.

Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS

CHKDSK can correct these types of errors, but it's best to replace the entire drive if it's out of warrantee.

Here's a how-to for CHKDSK (be prepared though, running a thorough scan can take a long time).

How to perform disk error checking in Windows XP

We have a newer XP that isn't used much so when his dies, will replace it with the newer one bought in 06.

I thought these might indicate a failing hard drive, but wanted her to run it by you guys. We uninstalled Avast in Safe Mode, and it did finally boot up to the desktop. But it was not responding to simple things like IE. I suggested the CHKDSK to see if it might fix something, but not holding my breath.

CHKDSK does a pretty good job at marking clusters bad and assigning new ones to replace them. Nearly all hard drives have some bad clusters, Format and CHKDSK will detect them, but on large drives it can take forever and a day.

Personally, I'd opt to replace the drive - Retail drives always ship with software to transfer the content of the original. Bulk OEM drives require that you download it.

Make sure your BIOS completely supports large drives though, not all do. Depending on the service pack, Windows limits the maximum partition size, so you may ends up with multiple partitions to use the entire drive. With older PC's smaller drives are sometimes better (320 GIG or less).

Newegg has 80 GB HDDs for around $50.

If you're using NTFS formatting with XP SP2 or SP3, there's not much worry about hard drive size. XP original had limits around 137 GB. There's a thread about NTFS formatting and XP ***here***.

If you're using FAT32 formatting, Windows XP will only format space to about 32 GB, even though FAT32 partitions can be formatted to larger sizes by other operating systems and utilities and you can install XP on them later.

Got 2 Trojans with Malwarebytes. Deleted them. Now trying to download Microsoft Security Essentials. May have to download it on a flash drive then install it.

I suspect you should replace the hard drive soon, trojans or not. You'd probably be very pleased with how much perkier the computer operated with a fresh hard drive and a fresh install of Windows.

I agree with Jenny - bandaids, baling twine, bubble bum and all that!

Yes do it, mine is working like a charm after I finally bit the bullet and realized that I could have three lemon hard drives in a row. Ask Draclvr.

Just to let you know. I was able to download IE8. Did a disk clean then defrag. Bill is back in business. He is happy. So be it, his choice. If and when it dies will change computers

Thanks for all your help.

Bets

Plus, she had to install SP2 and SP3 as it didn't have those either and since they want it connected to the internet, needed to have them.

So, YAY! And squeeze all you can out of that old computer!

Thanks for your help Drac. You going out and work in heat index of 106?

Just got in from working in the tomatoes for about an hour. Got some water and now I'm heading down to Longmeadow to climb on top of my manure compost piles to get interior temperatures! They are running about 125° F, so, needless to say, I'll be hitting my pool when I get home!

Hope Bill gets several more years out of his old computer!

Not to steal your thunder Drac, but we hit 118 yesterday (with humidity). About 11:30 last night the dust storms rolled in – fun stuff.

Our tomatoes got hit by a flock of hungry birds. We managed to save most of them though.


Back to Bill - yup, let keep our fingers crossed.

Please steal my thunder, Inland! Our humidity hit 82% yesterday and is thankfully only about 68% today and the temp is down to about 90°. I have 130 tomatoes, so losing a couple wouldn't put much of a dent in them!

Still 70 here with on and off showers (mostly off, thank goodness). I think I will stay up here on the mountain.

Keep us posted on Bill's old faithful, you are lucky that it has kept trudging along for so many years.

And even luckier that this is the computer Bill wants to use!

You all are so great.

Hey Drac, we got another 1.3 inches sometime during the night. It is supposed to be a little cooler today, upper 80's.

Just remember what we said about a new hard drive. It's silly to throw out a perfectly serviceable computer when all it needs is a new hard drive which can be bought for around $50.

Okay Jenny, will do.