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.

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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.)

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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?

How ya doing, buddy?

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.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

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

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

It shouldn't even bootup the OS without a correct copy of the file.

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?

I was speaking idiomatically.

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?

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Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

BIOS Settings?

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

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

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.

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.

FELIPE NO