Korean Job Discussion Forums

[the saint]

Well, here's the story that sees me possibly heading to Yongsan on Friday for a new HDD...

With Demo's help in June I put together my own computer including a 120Gig Western Digital SATA HDD. I had Adaware 6/SE running on this machine, used Diskeeper regularly and had Norton Internet Security 2004 running permanently with liveupdate. Almost all mail is web based so no real virus worries there.

However, I got lots of stuff trying to get through my firewall with my Thrunet cable connection and I also had Azureus and Shareaza running a fair bit of the time. I always scan downloaded files of any type before running them from P2P sources. Scans turned up nothing.

Anyway, some of you will remembering me posting about finding my computer on hold in the morning once with a wierd BIOS message forcing me to restart. THis happened one more time and then my shutdown times simply got longer and longer though everything seemed fine and virus scans and ad scans were turning up nothing.

I also noticed that despite not having much new data, my HDD showed remaining space was dropping weekly with, at the end, 80G of stuff where only about 25G of stuff was actually on the drive. I backed up everything just in time to turn it on one day to find it took me about seven restarts to get it to boot. Eventually it did and I would get it shutting down at random with no warning. No BSOD, just power off and reboot.

Well, I decided to reinstall winxp pro and format the HDD. It took several attempts, kept hanging during install no matter how I partitioned or didn:t the drive. Finally installed once on a full drive but I wanted to partition the OS section so I tried a reinstall. THis has so far been totally unsuccessful.

Despite checking all connections to the board and the jumpers etc in different combinations too e.g. master, slave install simply tells me during install that it cannot partition the disk any more due to a possible bad drive.

What the heck happened and should I simply trash the rather large, pricey and almost brand new drive and go for another on Friday? If I do, you can bet I will be buying two smaller drives than putting all my eggs in the metaphorical basket...

[jazblanc77]

Don't you just love computers? At what point did they start to grow brains just to screw with us all the time. It seems that whenever I have owned a computer, I have spent a large part of my ownership time, tweaking out or changing out, problems from the system.

Grrr. I hope you sort out your hdd.

[Falstaff]

Maybe someone who is more computer saavy than I can help you with this, but I remember a boot virus a few years ago called "tentacles". It was in the BIOS, and whenever you booted your hard drive, it would add strings of useless information onto the hard drive so that you eventually ran out of space. Maybe this is a new variant?

Or possibly your hard drive is just screwed. Just a thought.