Re: New AGP card crashed computer - now what?
- From: "Bob Harris" <rharris270[SPAM]@hotmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 08:17:46 -0500
After reading the series of suggestions and your responses, I tend to agree
that the hard drive is bad, not just some corrupt data, but
mechanically/electrically bad.
This reminds me of a frustrating problem I encounter several years ago. My
PC would not even complete the BIOS checks, let alone boot into XP, or get
far enough to press any "F" key to initiate some recovery process. The
problem was eventually traced to a bad USB hub, which was sucking too much
current, thus dropping the voltage to the motherboard enough to prevent the
BIOS checks from completing. Up until that point I had assumed that a PC's
power supply and/or design of the motherboard would limit current, but
apparently that is not always the case. Instead, I get the feeling that the
power supply is intended to limit the maximum voltage, that is, to smooth
out (small) fluctuations on the 110 VAC line.
But, there is a simple aeries of test you can run:
(1) Boot the PC into XP, then attach any USB device, except the suspect hard
drive, to the PC. If this works, the USB post on the PC is probably OK.
(2) Remove that USB device and attached only the external USB enclosure,
without the suspect hard drive. Caution: check the manual/website for the
enclosure to be sure that attaching it without anything inside will not harm
it. If it must have something inside, use a know-good hard drive, CD/DVD,
etc. If this works, then the enclosure is probably OK.
(3) Place the suspect hard drive in the enclosure and attach to the PC. If
the PC crashes, the hard drive is probably bad (95%+ chance).
(4) Download a "live" LINUX CD and boot the PC from it. (For example, the
KNOPPIX CD runs on most hardware.
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) Then attach the suspect hard
drive via the USB enclosure. If this also crashes the PC, the odds are
about 100% that the hard drive is bad in a mechanical/electrical sense. If
it does not, then you might have some sort of virus in the master boot
record or partition table, and which is specific to windows operating
systems. (This is a very wild guess, and most unlikely.) But, if you can
read the hard drive recover files, remove partitions, reformat.
As far as the AGP card itself, be aware that there are three different
voltages for AGP cards, 3.3, 1.5, and 0.8 volts. Some motherboards are
smart enough to sense the card's required voltage and provide it. Others
can sense a mismatch, and will refuse to boot, possibly giving some "beep
code". My ASUS P4S8X gives a verbal error message about such an
incompatibility. However, it is also possible that a mismatch will destroy
the video card and/or the motherboard. Thus, be sure of the voltages,
before you install any AGP card, unless the same make/model as previously.
See the following link for much good information about AGP:
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpfix/agpfix.html This link lists which card
make/model has what flavor of AGP and which mother board (chipset) is
compatible with which card type.
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html That all said, if you can
see even some of the BIOS checks on the screen, then the video card is
working, and your problem is something else (likely the hard drive).
"M Skabialka" <mskabialka@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23Qnef8J1JHA.5440@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
A friend bought a new monitor for his XBox and wanted to also use it for
his computer also but the computer only had a VGA port. He bought a new
AGP video card with DVI-D interface and installed it into his 5 or 6 year
old XP computer. It immediately crashed on boot, BSOD with errors about
ntfs.sys, even when he put the old video card back, or even used the
onboard video card. Set CMOS back to defaults, changed out the memory,
CMOS battery, and other PCI cards. Finally took the hard drive out and put
it in an external USB case and connected that to anothr XP machine which
promptly crashed as soon as it recognized the USB connection. Tried it a
couple of times more - crashed again each time with a generic MS message
about possible driver problems.
Until this point this PC was working great - what are some steps to
getting this drive woking again, and saving data if ast all possible? I
am wary about connecting the drive to a known good machine as I don't want
it to kill it! Anti-virus was up-to-date.
Mich
.
- References:
- New AGP card crashed computer - now what?
- From: M Skabialka
- New AGP card crashed computer - now what?
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