Any PC engineers types out there? Possible Hard Drive problem

[myrubicon]

Hoping someone can diagnose the problem with my PC, although I know it's tricky without seeing it.

I'll try & keep it short:

I run XP Home with a dual screen videocard. It is nearly 2 years old and has run perfectly. Recently the screen images started playing up badly (tizzing/banding etc) to the extent that I couldn't use the PC at all, so I bought a new video card and installed it.

The PC still(?) didn't boot up (couldn't test this with old video card), it just stopped at the intel splash screen, and the F2 key did not take it into BIOS. Nothing worked at all.

Suspecting a hard drive problem I took the hard drive into a PC repair place, where they plugged it into another PC and it booted fine, straight into the XP login screen.

So I thought the motherboard must be dodgy, took that to the PC repair place, where they bench tested it with their own XP loaded har drive + a video card. Again it worked fine, booting straight into XP.

So I thought it can only be the PSU, especially since the new video card needed more power than the original one. So I bought a more powerful one & fitted it.

Even with all of this my PC STILL only gets to the intel splash screen. GRRR. I changed the SATA cable from HD to montherboard. that didn't work.

So, I disconnected the HD. Powered it up and bingo - the started working, up to the point where motherboard cannot find a bootable device. Surely something is up with the HD. But the HD works. I saw it working at the PC repair place.

I can't take it back to the PC repair place for 2 weeks, so PLEASE, is there anyone out there that can suggest something else to try?!!

Oh. That wasn't very short was it?

Sorry, third post in my own thread. Just saw post from UQD & it reminded me that before I changed the video card I could boot into Safe Mode for a while. But even that stopped being possible. Using last known good settings got me to the XP login screen but again, this was with the old vid card and could get no further.

When in Safe Mode (before new vid card)the screen images were fine.

Not sure if this is relevant.

I am suspicious of physical RAM rather than hard drive or video RAM. If you switch your machine on and off, maybe urban myth but they used to suggest the chips would rise... now with RAM normally being on small circuit boards, there's little chance of movement, but certainly chances of dust and grime getting in.

In safe mode (likely to be 640 x 480) there may be much less RAM used than you could be using with your video card.

On this PC I am using 1280x1024, on laptop #1 it is 1366x768 (Win7 widescreen), on laptop #2 screen #1 (widescreen) is 1280x768 and screen #2 (external) is 1024x768. As you can see, compared with 640x480 these eat up memory. Another PC has 2x 512MB video cards in so none of the main RAM needs to be used for video image, but there will be knowledge of what windows hold and that too takes RAM.

Is there no-one local you know (a neighbour for example) who can loan you a hard drive or can you get one on Ebay using the PC you typed your MN posts on ? Just that with a spare hard drive you could see if you could get Linux running (assume 2 to 5 quid on Ebay for a CD or DVD with a linux "live" version... "live" means it will run off the CD/DVD and can be installed if you have a suitable hard drive...

Of course I'd prefer to suggest getting a pirate copy of Windows XP but that would be illegal and far from easy if you cannot go online and download it yourself (should you even be tempted to try).

I'm still not entirely sure the drive is your problem, but at the same time, would only suggest trying linux out with a spare drive rather than your existing one with Windows, applications, and all your data on it.

and complete nosiness on my part, but why didn't you take the whole setup in in one go rather than have them test it piece by piece ?

Thanks for the ideas, NG. I do have a spare HD, so I'll try that. I have swapped the ram cards around thus trying each individually but that made no difference.

I'll try the old HD and see what happens!

Oh, and I would have taken the whole pc in, but I'm a cheapskate. I expected them to suck their teeth and charge for a few hours work but knew they'd quickly bench test for free ! :-)

OK, don't blame you.

I have maybe a dozen older PCs in the garage and some more coming next week (along with 5x 17" monitors, just filling space where I used to work) so have loads of spares (but then again, I live with just a cat, so she has to accept that I might fill whole rooms with my clutter!)

Good luck!