Hello very strange scenario here. My friend has asked me to look at his PC as when is starts up and loads into XP, minutes later the screen goes blank and the hard disk activity light goes on constant. At first I suspected there may be corruption in the hard drive. Initially I added the drive as a slave to my PC and ran chkdsk and nortons disk doctor. A couple of errors were reported and corrected. I then returned the disk to the original machine and still the same problem. Next I ran the western digital disk checking tool, this did not report any problems. I then booted the drive as the master in my PC but know problems reported. Beginning to look like the problem was not disk related. On my friends machine I then booted from a W2K and ME drives (separately) thankfully the problem was still there. This surely ruled out the drives. Although I was not sure at this stage what could be causing the problem I decided to remove the video card (32MB Geforce2 MX200) and an old card I had (ATI rage 32MB). Initially the machine appeared to boot OK with the 2GB W2K drive and stay up and running for a good 15 mins. At this point I changed the drive to the orginal XP drive. The machine booted up OK and appeared to be working ok. However after about 10 mins the machine froze and I was unable to use the mouse or keyboard. The hard disk activity light was showing that the disk was being accessed constantly. After re-booting the machine (only possible way was to pull power connection) the problem happened again. On the second time the machine went into a chkdsk. After leaving this over night I thought when I returned in the morning the machine would hopefully be running OK or frozen as described above. However, the chkdsk had frozen at 14% - strange. Re-booted the machine a chkdsk ran again but this time the OS started but froze as previously described after 5-10mins. At this stage the only difference there appeared to be from the original problem reported by my friend was that I now had video output. Again to try and rule out any disk problems I booted from the w2k 2gb disk as like the XP disk the machine froze after 5-10mins but still had video ouput. This has now got me really stumped. It would great to know if anyone out there has any ideas on what I could look at next. I appreciate that it could be a multidude of things but any ideas would be greatly appreciated. It is very strange that such a similar problem is affecting 3 separate disks and OS' and how one video card appears to temporarily die when the machine freezes and the other does not.
Hope someone can help me with new ideas
Regards
Graeme
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