Severe PC problems, any suggestions?

[ZeeJustin]

18 hours ago, my PC (laptop, Windows XP, 1.5 years old although I did a complete reinstall about 2 months ago) was working fine, but in the past 5 hours, some crazy sh*t has happened.

I started my PC up, except it wouldn't boot up. I got an error that said Optical Drive not found. I tried again a few times, and finally got it to work by hitting my monitor pretty hard.

The PC is working fine for about 45 minutes, and then I get the blue screen of death. Beginning dump of physical memory appears, and so do some other messages that I don't have time to read. The next thing i know, my PC is turned off.

This has happened about once an hour for the past 5 hours, and half the time, when I try to reboot, I get that same Optical Drive not found error.

On about the 4th reboot, scan disk ran, but didn't give me any sort of analysis afterward.

When I reported the error, a message said that my pc was having trouble reading one of my hard disks, and that the problem should be gone, but obviously it isn't.

Thanks in advance.

[BookOfIcculus]

Here are some ideas. Make sure all of your ribbons to your hard drives are connceting solidly. This is most likely not the problem but it is the easiest to check. You should have an antivirus program, firewall, and antispyware programs installed. Go out and dl all of these if you don't all ready have them. You should have windows restore. This will let you go back to an earlier time when your computer was working correctly. If you don't have windows restore unistall all programs you installed recently and make a note not to install them again.

If all else fails. You will need to do a complete re-install. Do yourself a favor buy partition magic and partition your hard drive so that the C: drive only has windows OS files on it. Then use the rest of the hard drive for programs and storage. That way next time you have to do a complete re-install you only have to re-install windows and all your programs and files are still there.
Gl you got something pretty nasty.

Oh I just thought of something that rarely ever happens, but there is a slim chance it is happening here. You RAM is bad. MOre than likely you have more than one stick of ram remove one at a time to see if that clears up the problems.


I tell you one thing tho, these computers are just a fad soon to go the way of the velcro shoe. And we will all be using that chinesse bead counter thing again.

[PDX_David]

I got that optical drive error a while back. May have had something to do with it dropping out of the front pocket of a suitcase and on to the floor. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Anyways, on mine I can remove the cdrom drive and replace it with another battery. I removed and reseated the cdrom drive and have not had a problem since.

If you are getting hard drive errors as well. You may try removing and reseating the harddrive too.

Good luck

[SomeTimesIWin]

If you are having trouble with a hard disk use chkdsk from the command line (cmd). It will identify possible HD errors. I'm not in front of an XP-system right now so I can't give you more on this but maybe somebody else can give better instructions.