Did crash cause damage?

initiatefailure

First off this is my computer:

nvidia 9600gt
amd athlon 64x2 5800+
xp 32 bit
300gb seagate IDE drive
4gb ram
450w psu

I might have to check the ram because my dxdiag shows up as 3070mb of memory and i'm not sure if that's including or excluding what's being used to run the system.

What happened was I closed a game and pretty much the instant the game shut down i went to my start menu and hit shut down. The computer blue screened and crashed. I tried a few times to get it to turn back on and it wouldn't load past the bios page so i left it off over night. The next day I tried to turn it on and it came up but windows was slow to load.
Since then anything that needs to load has taken longer. The only real benchmark I have on the loading speed difference is that before I would load a CoD4 map with about 6 seconds before a game starts. Now when I try to load into a map it goes slow enough to time out.
Here's what I've tried so far. Cleaned out my case, cleaned up my disk and defragged it. Switched to a different powersupply I have, discovered that the IDE cord on my harddrive was only half connected because one side of the plastic connection had broken and parts of the cord weren't on the metal connectors in the plug and replaced that with another cord I had, done a full safe mode virus scan and I think that's about it to this point.

Performance is still really strange. Everyone works fine basically. It's just that windows is slow on the initial load and games are slow at loading screens.

I'm not really sure what else to try here. I'm currently working on moving files to externals and my laptop in case I have to do a full reboot

baudattitude

I hate to be alarmist, but the last time I had problems that were exactly as you describe, the drive died for good a couple of weeks after the symptoms started occurring. What I was seeing was that the hardware was failing, but it would keep trying and eventually get data off it... until the drive went past that the point of no return.

Back that bad boy up, is what I'm suggesting, and wouldn't it be a neat plan to treat yourself to a replacement, larger hard drive? They're awfully cheap these days.

Seeks

Try tooling around in safe mode and see if it has anything to do with the graphics card, just in case.

But yeah, seconding what baud said.

SiliconStew

If that 9600gt has 1GB of memory then only 3GB of addressable memory are left for the OS. More RAM will not change this. Upgrade to 64bit OS.

You most likely have harddrive failure or data corruption. Buy a new one, load the OS on the new one. Install the old drive as a slave and copy as many files from the old drive as possible. It's possible you could get away with just imaging the old drive to the new one, but if there is data corruption, you're going to have the same problems with the new drive.

travathian

Did it damage the hardware? Doubful

Did it corrupt files on the hard drive? Likely

Given the specs of your system I have no idea why you are even using an IDE drive. Go snag a cheap SATA drive, like this WD Black 500gb for $70, or another in the WD Black series and get a huge boost in performance.

As noted, 4 gigs of ram is pointless on XP 32bit. If you are a student you can get Win7 for $30 and get the 64-bit professional version.

initiatefailure

Yeah i've actually been planning on upgrading the harddrive ever since I almost filled it and had to clear space just to defrag it. I've since cleared out about half the space. Honestly it's IDE because I wasn't really paying attention when I was ordering all my parts and just said screw it it's going in when it got to me.

I got a $50 gift card for best buy from christmas so I figured I'd see if they sold hard drives the next time I go out there and I am gonna order my student copy of 7. I didn't know that was a deal going on.

The only thing's I'm worried about getting off the old Drive are all my games and CS4. I have my adobe stuff on another computer already and I think I can use the Steam backup games function (which as I understand it just creates installers for all the games so you don't have to download it all). Would it be safe to move the back-up using the old drive as a slave or should I try to clear out my 120gb external to move it through that? Also if a main drive is 7 and a backup is xp will they play nice together?

Also after i reset the old drive is there a way to make sure it was just certain files that where corrupt and not hardware damage?


EDIT: aww the $30 win7 deal ended yesterday. it's $60 now

travathian

$60 for the upgrade to Win7 Pro is still a pretty darn good deal.

Teth

Failures lead to the crashes, not the other way around (the OS can't halt in such a manner that will inflict harm on the hardware - though it could obviously corrupt system drivers/libraries/etc).

It could be anything. I suggest configuring your system to generate a kernel dump (system properties > advanced > startup and recovery options > kernel dump), make sure you have a page file on your system drive (where Windows is installed, more than likely C:) that's at least 2 GB - should large enough for a full dump - though I'd go 3 GB to be safe.

The next time it halts, if it does, check your event log for two events - the first one saying that a crash dump has been generated, and the second with the bugcheck and bug ID of the specific crash. Google from there. If that doesn't turn up anything, download the Windows Debugging tools, Google use on that (just two commands you need to remember, !analyze -v and lvm) and use it to debug the crash dump: %windir%\MEMORY.DMP. Again, Google the results. It's more straight forward than you think.

Tip: you will have to specify your symbol path in the debugger, just set it to:
SRV*c:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

You can replace the c:\websymbols with any location on your system you want to cache them to at the time of debugging.