Tempermental Computer
 

Okay here's the deal.
My computer has been playing up for the past week now and it is really begin to annoy me. My main HDD makes clicky and whiring sounds every once in a while, like every few days or so.
And also it keeps restarting itself, and not detecting the main HDD, so I have to change the power cables round so that it will the detect the HDD, strange thing is it only does this some of the time. I mean it's not clicking or whiring now.

Another thing is, when playing Battlefield 2 online my computer decides that sometimes it doesn't want me to play it so it gives me the blue screen of death.
Something about Machine_check_exception. And just 20 minutes ago it shut down completely, without any warning.

I recently enabled Broadband on my computer, so I guess that this could be some of the problems, but not all.

EDIT: I have just upgraded to XP SP2, as well. I have ZoneAlarm Firewall, and Avast! Antivirus.

Any help would be much appreciated.

The machine check exemption error you see means there is some sort of hardware fault so severe that windows can't recover from it. Alongside problems with your hard drive disappearing from the bios and clicking, I'd say it's dying. Before you start another round of BF2, I'd back up your personal files to another drive and start looking for any OS disks you have.

Depending on the manufacturer of your drive, they might have diagnostic tools you can download to see just what problems it has. I'd recommend giving them a shot if possible, or just get a new hard drive and be done with it.

Thanks for that Sol.

I've run PowerMax and it found and fixed the problems. I'll see how it goes for the next couple of days, it my HDD starts playing up again I'll just sling it and start again. (I've already backed up my files, I don't want to be losing them anytime soon.)

Drive's failing. Save up your bucks for replacement.

And backup your data... before its too late.

I've backed up my data onto another hard drive, and installed XP onto my SATA drive, but it's not liking that. I have to have the HDD with the first installation of XP in, for it to boot off the SATA, and now it says that I'm missing a file, even though before I rebooted the from the SATA it was fine.

I'll go find out the name of the file. *restarts computer*

EDIT: The message I get when trying from my SATA is:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
<Windows root>\system32\dal.dll
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

I found the file on the SATA so I'm guessing that it must be corrupted, I tried to copy the dal.dll from my current installation of Windows but got the same results. Am I going to have install Windows, again?

dal.dll? Don't you mean hal.dll? (hardware abstraction layer)

hmmm, oh yeah. I copied down wrong. What is this, what does it do?

Could you guys please help. My computer keeps switching itself off (only the case, the monitor goes to standby, and the speakers stay on) if I try to do too much, namely any games that I spent more than an half hour on.

hal.dll is a core component layered over the kernel. It is crucial for OS startup. It shouldn't even bootup the OS without a correct copy of the file.

What you can do: Replace the harddrive and do an additional memory check. The memcheck only to be sure your RAM isn't also faulty.

I'll take the SATA back tomorrow, and hopefully, now that I've found the receipt for it they'll let me exchange it for a new one. I'll also give memtest a go to see if this brings up any problems that I'm not aware of.

It looks as if I'm gonna have to put up with my clicky HDD for a little while longer :(

I'm booting off the clicking HDD. I did manage to boot off the SATA once, but after the first time I restarted it, it wouldn't let me boot from it. I can still see, and access all the files that are on the SATA when I boot from my clicky HDD. Does this hal.dll only affect the bootup of the HDD?

Maybe you should check both drives for data corruption before continuing your experiments.
Also you can get a fresh copy of the hal.dll from you Windows Install CD. Guides how to extract single files from the disc are on the net.

Any suggestions on the best tool to use to test my hard drives?

I've re-fomatted and re-installed Windows onto my SATA, and it is working, but I can't boot directly from the SATA. I have to have my hard drive as the first HDD that the system boots off for it to work. When I try to directly boot off my SATA it displays the following message.

Boot from CD:
Boot from CD:
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.

And also, when I boot up it gives me a choice of 3 XP operating systems to boot up with. One is the OS on my main HDD, another one is the one on my SATA, and the other, well.... I don't where that came from. It looks as if it is the version that I had the trouble with the hal.dll file with, but I can't find that installation of Windows on any of my HDD, it was on my SATA, but as I mentioned eralier I re-formatted it.

Any ideas on this one?

The tool from your harddisk vendor, if existant.


BIOS Settings?

First remove the faulty drive completly from the system. Plug it off from both IDE controller and power supply. The drive is broken and causes trouble, maybe not only for itself, but also affecting the rest of the system.

For booting from SATA check the BIOS and if there are no settings then get an upgraded BIOS and check again. If nothing shows up than you're out ot luck and better get an normal IDE replacement drive.

I checked my BIOS settings, and I have the SATA to boot up before the CD drive.

The IDE drive or the SATA?

EDIT: scrap that. I've removed the IDE HDD, and now the SATA booted up without any trouble what so ever. I even did a little jig when it did. :) I've just too install all my stuff again now. Aw well, at least it works now.

Thanks for all the help LiquidAcid. I really appreciate it.

np

And always remember: Broken hardware can become kamikaze, that does not only apply to harddrives.