quote:
Originally posted by CookieRevised
and Sunshine does have a second PC she can use. In that situation swapping HDD's is the quickest and safest way to backup..
Installing/connecting a second HD indeed isn't such a biggie. Remains one problem if i was to do that. All HDDs in this PC are completely NTFS and the second computer i could use runs on WinME, so it won't recognize NTFS disks (blah i regret setting the first partition on my second HD to NTFS instead of Fat32 now). There's also no way i could get WinXP to run on my second computer as it doesn't meet the specs...
But rest assured there's nothing on C: that really needs backing up, only the OS and installed programs are on there..my documents, music and installationfiles are safely on another HDD. The only downside to formatting is that i need to reinstall all my programs (and drivers) from scratch, wich takes many hours. Also i don't think reformatting will solve it as this has been done recently already and the problem came back without me doing anything to cause it.
Update on the matter:
This morning i had the idea to try and boot up Windows without the second HD connected (it's in a rack so it's easy to remove), it booted up just fine. Then i reconnected the second HD whilst the comp was still "cold", rebooted and it hung again. I downloaded a diagnostic tool from the Maxtor site (both my HDs are Maxtor) and ran a couple tests (the basic ones), it passed the installation test and the quick test. Not done the advanced test yet (wich will scan for bad sectors). As the rack has a diskcooler built in i wanna test if disabling this will solve the problem..if it does i suspect that this lil extra is asking just a little bit too much from my PSU. Remains the question why was it working fine before? Is my PSU slowly dying? Does having the second HD connected adress the memory in such a way that it won't work with 256Mb RAM (if one stick is faulty i got 256 of 512 left)? If my RAM is to blame why does it still say i got 512 when i go to system?
More testing to be done tomorrow as i can only do this when the computer is still cold (there's no problems when it's not).
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