your strange computer occurances

[deanboyj]

This thread is for anyone's strange computer occurances
ill start with mine...
Has anyone ever had a cd shatter within the drive while spinning up?!
im the only one i know that has done this
is started to whir up, and it shattered into a million pieces, and we had to get a new drive bc we couldnt get all the pieces out (we didnt want to open it cuz it would void the warrenty, we got a new one free)

[HAL9000]

Never had it happen to myself, but I have heard of it before. Some of those drives are spinning in excess of 10,000RPM and all it takes is a minor flaw in the molding of the CD to cause a failure.

[Carl Price]

I have a computer (Celeron 400) that works perfectly in normal mode but will not boot into safe mode.

[deanboyj]

yea i think the fact that the cd was a backup copy of broodwars, it was made like a day after my friend got a cd burner (like when they first came out) and has been used a LOT so there was probably a bend and it started spinning and, well, it kinda sounded like a gunshot, and i thought a car was backfireing outside

[Hpro]

Carl -
what's the problem with the celery is there or are there any error messages ? Are you able to boot to MS-DOS prompt ? Or does it just hang ? Very interesting stuff - this has happen before I think it was on a Pentium ll - or alike let me know..

[Charliey]

I havent had a cd break, but i have a game (Tread Marks, really small publisher) which was made with defects, and there were many reports of them shattering if they were used in high speed drives. I made a copy with my 12x drive.

[Carl Price]

Originally posted by Hpro Carl - what's the problem with the celery is there or are there any error messages ? Are you able to boot to MS-DOS prompt ? Or does it just hang ? Very interesting stuff - this has happen before I think it was on a Pentium ll - or alike let me know..

No messages. If I try to go into safe mode, it hangs right after it shows the mouse hourglass. Normal mode is fine and command prompt is fine, no problems. Just no safe mode!

[HAL9000]

Gee... guess you're kinda screwed if you can't boot normally then

One of the more "strange" events I had was with a system I used to have. I had bought a PS2 mouse. I had a P166MMX on an Abit VX motherboard, and it had the PS2 connection. It ran fine for 3 months, until one morning, I booted it up and as soon as it got to the GUI, it gave me a fatal exception error with my virus scanner. I messed around with it for about an hour, then opened the case and started yanking hardware to see if anything there was a problem. I tried it stripped down to just the video card and tried a different video card as well. I tried different RAM and a different power supply and CPU. Not really wanting to gut the motherboard, I tried to run MS Backup to backup my stuff so I could reload the system. I got a fatal exception error with MS Backup. I then ran MS Backup on my second machine to backup everything across the network. Fine, formatted, reloaded, got to the GUI and it crashed again. Totally frustrated, staring at the motherboard getting ready to gut it out, thinking about what have I changed recently, I thought of the mouse. It was the only hardware that had been changed in the past three months. I pulled it out and dug out an old serial mouse and everything worked fine. I then restored everything so the system was back to the way it was and running fine. I tried the PS2 mouse again, and there was the crash again. Took the mouse back to work and tried it on three other machines and everything works fine. Finally sold the mouse with a used machine to a friend and he is still using 3 years later without incident.

[Hpro]

Carl,
In the BIOS of your computer you will find a setting for the VGA adapter - CACHE enable / disable - so if this is set to disable then enable it if the contrary is the case then Disable it and I think your comuter mostly will boot into safe mode without problems also make sure that Legacy options in the Bios are all SET TO DISABLED when it comes to the VGA...

those would be in order - VIDEO BIOS SHADOW = if D-abled then Set to enable or if E-abled then set to D-abled , depends on the setting you find..

PCI/ VGA Palette Snoop - Must be DISABLED
VIDEO RAM CACHEABLE - Should be disabled


Hth

[Kubie]

I have an EMachine that likes to start up on its own. It may be 15 minutes or 15 days, but just starts up. No ryme or reason. The only temporary fix is to reinstall Windows.
Carl

[archie]

Carlgif, could it be the power management settings in the BIOS? Turn them off ... more specifically, the power up settings in PM.
Hal's story reminds me of the time that a client's computer was getting a BSOD when the PC was booted. Found out that she was cleaning the keys earlier. Changed the keyboard and voila. This one was fixed in a few minutes but had I not considered the keyboard, it could have been much longer.

[Kubie]

Archie,
Thanks for the reply. PM in the Bios is disabled, same thing in PM in the control Panel. The pc is at my in-laws now and after he shuts down, he just hits the switch on the surge protector. I know thats not the best way to do it, but the pc is in the bedroom and sometimes it would come on at midnight and wake them up.
Carl

[HAL9000]

I had a client with that problem before and it was caused by flakey power in the house. I told him to get a UPS and it hasn't done it in over a year now.

[Kubie]

Hi Hal,
Flaky power could be the problem but it must be throughout the city. This pc has done this in 3 different locations now. It always works for awhile and when it gets in one of it's moods, the problem persists until a reinstall is done.
Oh well, no big thing. No data is lost, no crashes. Guess I should be satisfied.
Carl

[glc]

I have a customer with the same problem, Carl - it's a clone with a Gigabyte motherboard - and I have read posts that this is not an unknown problem with those boards. They are doing the same thing - hitting the power strip after they shut down.

[Colonel Sanders]

My slgithly strang experience...

I just tested my bandwidth (http://computingcentral.msn.com/internet/speedtest.asp) and found a way to trick it into rateing me at really really high bandwidth. I loaded the test, then decided I wanted to do it again so I clicked the back button on my broweser, but apparantly that is one of those self-loading pages that I went back to which immediatly sent me to the results again. Instead of 360 some Kb/s, it showed me with unlimited Kb/s. I thought it was kinda cool(at least a way to impress people with no computer knowledge ).

Logan

[Charliey]

You get the unlimited speed because its loading the page from the cache.

[Hpro]

Yes I just again came across a real weird thing in my life yesterday and had to remember one of the past...

A customer coming by and his DX2-66 486 didn't show any Video (PCI ALI chipset) - so removed the VGA cleaned it reinserted it and there we went booting up all the way Win95 - so he ask me to install a Second hand 1.2Gb SEAGATE (CONNER) drive and move the operating system Win95 to that drive from the original 240 Mb Seagate drive - since there is no such thing as booting from the D:\drive I connected the 1.2 GB drive as a slave to the primary 240 Mb drive - booted and then went into bios AMI 1995 to have the drive detected - and just nothing came up - shutting down and checking cable and jumpers on the drive - listening if ths drive would spin up and to the regulary disk search (for all who ever help a drive besides the ear they will know the sound - when this occurs)someting like BRRRRRRRRRRR tok ...this is when the drive has been initialized - and it did it in fact just well - but the drive didn't show up in the bios..

getting another IDE cable hoocking the drive up as secondary Master and there it poped up in the bios - now booting up to windows - copied FILECOPY.EXE to the root of the D:\ drive assured myself that the D:\ was there and then Start > RUN filecopy C: d: ok and there it went again - unable to access D:\ A R F -abort retry Fail? Aborted restarted and then ghosted the complete C:\ to D:\without any problems --
I found out that the 240Mb drive was occupying both IDE channels - with this I mean primary master slave and also secondary master slave - but to my surprise only on Windows..
I didn't had the drive INSTALLED mechanically into the computer and it was laying upside down - PCB facing heaven- and then I changed the cables and it would just take almost a minute until the drive got detected - once detected booted into win95 -taking about 5 minutes - on a real snail speed - Now I remembered that in the past I've had this problem with Conner - Seagate drives -that those actually would CRAWL when laying on their back - fixing the drive into the case in the right manner and it would just boot windows 95 within 40 seconds so if anyone expereience something like this then try several position how the drive could be installed - I saw this only on two Seagate - Conner models..

Now anyway it's a kind of strange since drive mechaincs are some of the most accurate and sophisticated mechaincal devices I have seen, so flipping the drive actually should not that much influence on a drive..but his isn't true when it comes to conner seagate...Models 450 Mb - 1.2 GB

[reboot]

I found an older Fujitsu drive, 3.2 gig. It was originally in a generic box (AT), with Win95 on it. I pulled it, in order to slave it into an ATX box with a new 10 gig, and Ghost the system.
The drive would spin up, then promptly spin back down, and NOT detect in BIOS. I fdisked, formatted, tried Spinrite, everything I could think of. NOTHING would get this drive to detect, and STAY spinning. I ghosted it to a 3rd drive in it's original AT box, just to make sure I didn't lose anything.
I totally changed all the power management settings in BIOS, and messed with a few other things, still nothing.
I finally yanked the power plug to it, and plugged it directly into an AT power supply. Voila, spinning, and detected, no problem. Ghost the OS to the new drive, plug it back into the ATX supply...no spin...
This drive will NOT work on an ATX supply. I tried 3 different PS's, thinking I had a flaky one, but no...it will ONLY work on an AT supply.

[Jenni]

My brother has had two separate cases of computer weirdness where changing the CPU was the cure! One has been a PCChips/Celeron 566/Photoshop 5.x combo where Photoshop will not run with that combo. Change the CPU, and all is well. Put that CPU on a different board and all is well. The second was with a Gigabyte board he just got. Set up all hardware, working fine. Install UT, BSOD after BSOD, UT crashed constantly. Change out all possible hardware. Reformat numerous times. Gets pissed and swaps CPU's (Celeron 766 and 633). Voila!, now UT works just fine!