superklye
07-29-04, 08:35 AM
So here's a bit of a funny story:
After an exciting night of playing Far Cry, Halo and WC3 in DX9 goodness thanks to my new eVGA 6800 GT, I wake up this morning and go to my computer and I move the mouse to turn the monitors back on from their sleep mode. Everything seems to be working fine, AIM is still connected and so is BitTorrent. I moved the mouse down to the task bar so I can launch IE and then it freezes. The bar autohides again but leaves a streak of where it had been and won't come back up. All the programs open freeze. I hear this odd click. I looked around thinking that someone had walked in behind me and ****ed a gun.
No one there.
I look back to the computer. Still frozen. Right click, left click, nothing is working! The three finger salute gets nothing but a laugh from the computer. It has completely locked up. There is nothing to do but a hard restart.
The computer runs through it's diagnostics. Two hard drives on IDE0, a DVD and CD burner on IDE1 and the RAM is fine. The CPU is running at a cool 39 degrees (I love that new heatsink) and the ATA133 card has two 160GB drives attached. Everything is running as planned.
The black screen before the Windows load bar appears on schedule. It stays. And stays. And stays a bit longer. Another hard reset gets me back to Windows and logged in, but Explorer has crashed before it even loaded. Only by getting to Task Manager and creating/ending Explorer five times am I able to get my desktop back and the start bar loaded. Nothing else is loaded. I had this problem before, when the original 60GB failed. I heard that click again and recalled hearing it multiple times while the computer was refusing to boot. Anyway, I didn't like that McAfee hadn't loaded along with Motherboard Monitor, so I figure that since I've gotten Explorer running now, a soft restart should work. It didn't and the same thing happened.
By now, it was 7:15 and I was running late. I restarted again with the XP disc in the drive (and the clicking noise still being heard about every five seconds) and boot into Windows set up. Instead of going to the recovery console, I accidenly did a repair in which Windows deleted a bunch of system files and reinstalled them. After clicking the wrong thing, I got fed up and just got in the shower. It was a quick ten minutes and I get out and dried and come back to my room to find that XP is loading. And loading and still loading for over 5 minutes. It didn't work. I restarted and it did the same thing, it showed the loading screen but there was absolutely no CPU activity; nothing but that clicking. I go into XP setup again while eating breakfast (back on schedule now, too) and run the Console. I did a check disk and lo and behold: the 15GB drive has "one or more critical errors that cannot be repaired."
That clicking was, as I was begining to fear, the click of death. So now, after work, I have to reinstall XP on the new 60GB drive that was just RMAed. Thank God I made a 10GB partition on the 60GB for just this reason. But man, talk about frustrating. I am so afraid to use that computer now, it seems like everything goes bad.
After an exciting night of playing Far Cry, Halo and WC3 in DX9 goodness thanks to my new eVGA 6800 GT, I wake up this morning and go to my computer and I move the mouse to turn the monitors back on from their sleep mode. Everything seems to be working fine, AIM is still connected and so is BitTorrent. I moved the mouse down to the task bar so I can launch IE and then it freezes. The bar autohides again but leaves a streak of where it had been and won't come back up. All the programs open freeze. I hear this odd click. I looked around thinking that someone had walked in behind me and ****ed a gun.
No one there.
I look back to the computer. Still frozen. Right click, left click, nothing is working! The three finger salute gets nothing but a laugh from the computer. It has completely locked up. There is nothing to do but a hard restart.
The computer runs through it's diagnostics. Two hard drives on IDE0, a DVD and CD burner on IDE1 and the RAM is fine. The CPU is running at a cool 39 degrees (I love that new heatsink) and the ATA133 card has two 160GB drives attached. Everything is running as planned.
The black screen before the Windows load bar appears on schedule. It stays. And stays. And stays a bit longer. Another hard reset gets me back to Windows and logged in, but Explorer has crashed before it even loaded. Only by getting to Task Manager and creating/ending Explorer five times am I able to get my desktop back and the start bar loaded. Nothing else is loaded. I had this problem before, when the original 60GB failed. I heard that click again and recalled hearing it multiple times while the computer was refusing to boot. Anyway, I didn't like that McAfee hadn't loaded along with Motherboard Monitor, so I figure that since I've gotten Explorer running now, a soft restart should work. It didn't and the same thing happened.
By now, it was 7:15 and I was running late. I restarted again with the XP disc in the drive (and the clicking noise still being heard about every five seconds) and boot into Windows set up. Instead of going to the recovery console, I accidenly did a repair in which Windows deleted a bunch of system files and reinstalled them. After clicking the wrong thing, I got fed up and just got in the shower. It was a quick ten minutes and I get out and dried and come back to my room to find that XP is loading. And loading and still loading for over 5 minutes. It didn't work. I restarted and it did the same thing, it showed the loading screen but there was absolutely no CPU activity; nothing but that clicking. I go into XP setup again while eating breakfast (back on schedule now, too) and run the Console. I did a check disk and lo and behold: the 15GB drive has "one or more critical errors that cannot be repaired."
That clicking was, as I was begining to fear, the click of death. So now, after work, I have to reinstall XP on the new 60GB drive that was just RMAed. Thank God I made a 10GB partition on the 60GB for just this reason. But man, talk about frustrating. I am so afraid to use that computer now, it seems like everything goes bad.