Re: Trouble in the Dell

Don Phillipson wrote:

How wise is a complete reinstallation of WinXP on
a Dell Dimension (DIM 2400) via the Symantec Dell
PC System Restore (which the manual says on p.43
is "only as a last resort . . ." ?

Problem is ultra-slow operation (apparently not caused
by firewall, AV software etc.) I suspect damage to the
hard drive but am uncertain whether the cause is drivers
(software) or hardware malfunction. Evidence:

1. ScanDisk of C:\ would not complete. I was surprised
to see the GUI console reported:
-- one small FAT32 drive (no drive letter) 30 Mb
-- one normal drive C: NTFS about 38 Gb.

2. DOS CHKDSK /F reports
Fixed 2 corrupt attribute records.
Cannot continue in read-only mode.
(This is not because I logged on as user, not as administrator, is it?)

3. I downloaded 25 March new Dell diagnostics DELLDIAG.EXE
This runs in a DOS box but fails to execute, reporting
"memory protection fault"

I have so far failed to find in either the printed manual
or Dell documents on line either "memory protection fault"
or any reference to the hard drive being in "read-only mode"
or any mention of FAT32 drives. The PC remains cripplingly slow.


I would do hardware troubleshooting before messing about with software
solutions (the restore to factory condition). It does sound rather like you
have some hardware component (which could be the drive and/or other things)
that is failing.

First back up your data!

You really want to run hardware diagnostics outside of the operating system.
If you got a Dell Resource CD with the computer, you can boot with it and
the Dell Diagnostics are on there. The Dell Diagnostics may also be
available from a special partition on the hard drive which you get to by
pressing F12 at startup (boot priority selections). But since the drive is
suspect, you may want to use a diagnostic utility downloaded from the drive
mftr.'s website. Seagate's SeaTools For DOS works very well also. For
diagnostic utilities like that, you download the file and then create a
bootable CD by burning the .iso as an image - not data - to CD-R.

Change your boot priority to the optical drive by pressing F12 at startup
and run the diagnostic. If a hard drive diagnostic run outside of Windows
won't even complete, you know the drive is toast. That doesn't mean there
aren't other components failing but it's a start. Obviously if the drive is
bad you need to replace it.

http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Hardware_Tshoot

Malke
--
MS-MVP
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
Don't Panic!
.

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