Hell o

Hi,

I believe this is my very first post in any forum anywhere on the web, and I hope that by having joined majorgeeks.com I can finally put an end to my computer related problems.

I've been having so many computer problems I don't even know where to start, and I hope that after this post someone can give me a nudge in the right direction...

I have an old computer which started acting up and crashed, after which it would no longer start. Right after pressing the power button it would shut down again, and a friend mentioned it was probably due to the power supply, so I replaced it with a new one and I was able to start Windows (XP, sp3) again. Unfortunately this didn't last very long, and it crashed again.

I tried all sorts of things to try to get it running properly again, but to no avail, and in retrospect I even made a bigger mess of things.
I have ADHD/ADD related problems and in my unbridled enthusiasm I would run all sorts of programs suggested in different forums, only to read the warnings about these programs later.

All-in-all I believe my computer crashed about 150 times over the course of about two weeks, and I decided, seeing it was already an older computer, to replace it altogether.

After having done without a computer for over a month, I finally saved up enough and bought myself a new one...

... and it crashed the very same day.

Fortunately I had the common sense to create a recovery CD and a back-up of my HD this time.

Unfortunately it took a new crash for me to begin to suspect that the problem might lie with one of my three external Hard Drives...

To sum up:
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- Old computer, Windows XP (Can't reinstall windows using the original CDs because both CD-Rom drives are broken after a previous attempt to fix/clean them)

- Three external hard drives, one of which (the one containing all my backed-up schoolwork, hobbies, etc since I first logged on to the internet) gives the message 'MBR Code faked' using MBR Check

- New computer, Windows 7, which I have just bought and which has already crashed several times. MBR Check gives the following message: 'unknown MBR Code'...

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Hopes & Dreams

- I'm hoping to restore my old computer (perhaps creating an image of the original windows cd and make a bootable USB-stick?)

- I hope to safely fix my external hard drive without losing everything I backed up or back up safely what I have stored on it

- Get my new computer running without any problems

I hope someone can help me get started so I can put this big mess behind me and I can start enjoying using my computer again...

Regards,

John

 

Hi,

I just tried the following, with only my keyboard and mouse connected (both USB)

I tried to boot up my old computer, but it lost power somewhere during the Windows XP startup screen.

I tried again in safe mode, and I did get to choose how to start and I chose safe mode with 'opdrachtprompt', not sure what that is in English, something with being able to insert commands or so... and it shut down again.

Then I tried again and chose 'looking for errors' and it stopped again.

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I DO have my original Windows XP cd.
I haven't checked my device manager recently.

Currently I haven't even got my CDRom drives installed as hardware. Neither of them had worked properly for over a year, apart from the burner which would occasionally read original cds only. When my computer crashed I thought that it probably couldn't do any harm to have a look at both of them, thinking it either a software problem, which I checked at the time but which didn't seem to be the problem (but... well... I could have been mistaken...), a hardware problem (in which case probably nothing could be donemkb,v3p2*

 

Sorry,

disregard my prior message. somewhere whilst typing that message my keyboard switched settings I guess, seeing the keyboard key with '0' and ')' produced '0' and ' ' ' all of a sudden. This is very annoying and happens a lot, any help on this would be very welcome seeing I haven't figured out how to change this on my new computer...

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Hi,

I just tried the following, with only my keyboard and mouse connected (both USB)

I tried to boot up my old computer, but it lost power somewhere during the Windows XP startup screen.

I tried again in safe mode, and I did get to choose how to start and I chose safe mode with 'opdrachtprompt', not sure what that is in English, something with being able to insert commands or so... and it shut down again.

Then I tried again and chose 'looking for errors' and it stopped again.

---------------------------------------

I DO have my original Windows XP cd.
I haven't checked my device manager recently.

Currently I haven't even got my CDRom drives installed as hardware. Neither of them had worked properly for over a year, apart from the burner which would occasionally read original cds only. When my computer crashed I thought that it probably couldn't do any harm to have a look at both of them, thinking it either a software problem, which I checked at the time but which didn't seem to be the problem (but... well... I could have been mistaken...), a hardware problem (in which case probably nothing could be done) or a dirty lense.
Seeing I had checked for sofware problems I decided to try and clean the lenses, took out the drives and now they won't even open and I believe they gave me more problems installed so I left them out.

Funnily enough, when I remembered I could try to reinstall windows I had personally sabotaged the only way I knew how, namely using the original cd, which probably would have been read in the burner... Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty so they say.

Then I started to explore the possibility of creating a bootable USB-stick, seeing I have a new computer on which I suppose I should be able to create an image of my original Windows XP CD, and I have a USB stick or two which I could use for that purpose.

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Some other things that I remember and which are probably worth mentioning about my old computer:

- the motherboard was replaced after I fried it about a year or so ago
- I replaced the old power supply (DC Output 350W) with a new one (DC Output 400W)
- CWShredder found and removed CWSmsconfig
- I probably had too many USB devices connected
- I remember from my BlueScreenView logs several error mesages distinctly, concerning mostly ntoskrnl.exe, win32k.sys, hal.dll, and quite a few different USB related messages. Unfortunately the log is most likely on the old computer itself, so probably inaccessible at the time.

well, I hope this helps. I have the old computer set up next to the new one, and I'm still hoping to revive it, partly because I was hoping to hook it up to my tv etc downstairs, but mostly because I want to know what's wrong and I would love to be able to fix these type of things myself. I've learnt a lot about computers over the last month or so (especially not to tinker with them) and I would like to learn a whole lot more.

Regards,

John

 

Furthermore, on my old computer

- scans could no longer verify the signature of microsoft files and such
- user names appeared to be duplicated, but with another location
name/computer name
- the percentage of idle processes was high, say 90 percent or higher, but
built up out of two of let's say 45 percent each...

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On my new computer a new hard drive was created, a (Q: ) drive named Microsoft Office 2010 (protected). It wasn't there before, I don't remember creating this and I can't seem to do anything with it...

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Regards,

John

 

Don't worry about the Q: drive that is an Office thing. Annoying but not worth worrying about for now.

Working on the old computer. I would think the first goal would be to do a chkdsk /r on the file system. This would be best accomplished by running a bootable CD like your installation CD.

I realize you say your drives don't work in Windows but do you have them physically disconnected from the computer? Can you reconnect them?

If you hit f12 during power up do you get a choice of boot options such as HD or CDROM?

 

I used to have this one. Just try pushing the VGA card on your main board for better connected; taking it out and cleaning it then put it back tightly. That is for the VGA.

If it doesn't work, I guess it is because the Power supply is low on power (damaged by heat or lots of external devices connected to the computer--try unplugging them all and starting the computer)

Good luck with that!

 

Hi, thank you for your reply.

I'm glad I don't have to worry about the Q drive.

I physically disconnected both drives. I tried connecting them again and one won't even open and the other simply doesn't read inserted CDs or DVDs.

If I hit f11 I get a choice of boot options. Booting from the HD doesn't seem to work, neither does CDROM.

In the f2 (setup) and f11 it also shows that I have a floppy drive, which is weird because I never had one on that computer.

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At the moment I am trying to create a bootable USB stick with windows XP, but I am having some difficulties.

I am also thinking about trying Ubuntu...

Regards,

John

 

I created a bootable USB flash drive to install Ubuntu and selected it with f11.

Although the computer did not shut down as it did starting up Windows XP, I have not been able to install Ubuntu sucessfully.

I have made several attempts, on two of them got the following error message:

Errno 5: Input/Output error

Searching the web I believe this has to do with either a faulty CD/DVD Drive (but I used a USB stick) or a faulty hard disk and the following suggestions are made:

clean cd/dvd, burn cd/dvd at lower speed, clean cd/dvd lens, check whether hard disk is old & in need of replacement, move system to cooler environment.

Also, I tried the option 'test memory' from the Ubuntu option list. It runs for a short time after which the computer crashes again and shuts down.

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Considering everything I tried so far, with Windows XP shutting down trying to boot up (safe mode or no), the error message in Ubuntu and the crash during memory testing in Ubuntu do you suppose it could be a hardware problem?

Regards,

John

 

An older system?
I'm thinking that maybe it could be the CPU shutting down for its own safety.
May want to clean the CPU and heat sink, then install some fresh Thermal compound.
Blow out the dust and clean the fans while inside.

 

What keyboard do you have, US-English, or another language (Dutch, perhaps)?

Under Regional Settings (Control Panel) there is an option to add/change/remove keyboard layouts. You may have multiple entries there; that could be why your keyboard layout sometimes changes (e.g. when pressing Alt+Shift).

 

Hi,

you were right on the money!

I'm Dutch and I have a US-International keyboard, there were two different settings, Dutch and US-International.

I tried to change the keyboard settings by pressing ALT+Shift, but that didn't work. I googled it and apparently pressing the combination CTRL+Shift causes the switch in settings, something which sometimes happens by accident typing capitals.

I removed the Setting Dutch and now it should no longer be a problem.

Thanks,

John

 

On the old computer the shutting down completely seems to indicate a true problem with either power or CPU as hrlow2 suggested.

How did you set up your linux USB? I use this program which creates a Live USB version of Linux from your Linux ISO of choice (such as ubuntu or my preferred Linux Mint). I like it because it runs off the USB and no install necessary. You can set the Persistence to some number like 500mb and it will remember changes you make like adding extensions to Firefox web browser.

What I am thinking is that because I can't give you easy way to test the HD for problems is that you could start from a USB version of Linux and try to play a video file. Video files generally use a good amount of CPU resources and if it is the CPU that is causing shutdown then the PC should shutdown when playing a video off the USB. IT could still be a memory or power problem but we could eliminate the HD.

How big are your USB flash drives? I think Linux off USB is about the same size as the ISO maybe a little more say 800mb + persistence of at least 250mb= 1.1gb, still gives you room for 700mb video on a 2gb USB flash drive to test if playing a video shuts down the PC.