Hi there, As a very lovely Polish young lady at work USED to put it “Canna you ‘elp me!!!”

Just registered to try and salvage my daughters PC - if only to retrieve some of the data.

PC is around 2001 (read this on the memory test screen)

Brief HISTORY: - Computer has been generally "slow at everything" for a year or two i.e. slow to boot, slow to load I.E, just slow,slow,slow. (the James May of PC's.

Earlier this year it would not boot up, so got my nephew to look at it and he got it fired up and got it to repair itself – by getting it to run a program to repair the registry as far as I know, anyway the PC ran for several hours using a copy of something that was loaded onto it when first loaded with the O.S (windows XP)

Well, as D wanted it back we did not do any other work to it, as you might expect from a neglected Pc, it did not get much better, still very slow and all that.

Now it will not “boot up fully” or left to it’s self “not at all”!!!!

Symptoms

Press start button

Screen appears – American megatrends – Amibios © 2001

AV41P005 P4X333-8235 Intel ( r ) Celeron ( r ) CPU. 2.4o GHz

Checking NVram. Update OK

394944 kb OK - this counting usually freezes, at various random values – unless I choose to skip memory test or enter Setup.

If I hit escape to skip memory test – it runs on through a couple of screens listing various drives etc then to a black screen with a white bar runs across the bottom. It then loads the windows XP logo screen and the bar in the middle shows the loading process. This loading often freezes and will not continue.
When it does complete loading the User log on screen appears, so I enter the password and hit enter and it usually just sits there “saying” loading you personal setting and goes no further. If I wait too long to enter the user I.D the keyboard will not work.

On one occasion it did load the desk top but I COULD not do any thing with it.

Several times on boot up I got a “Secondary master drive – atapi incompatable” warning.

So I have unplugged the DVD drive and no longer get the warning (although I accept that this may have been an erroneous warning anyway).

Please could you advise if there is a way to get the beast running long enough to reclaim some of the data and/or work on the PC to make it healthier again?

I do realize that the HHD or other may be terminally sick.

Thanks in advance

Steve and for “M”

PS. in case it is important - the broadband modem has just been removed to fir into another PC for now

Slave Drive Info

For swapping the drive into a working desktop machine to retrieve your important info...
NOTE: The drive you are swapping does NOT need to be able to boot into Windows as the other machine will handle that...Quote from: moonrakermagpie on November 07, 2009, 03:25:02 PM

...Checking NVram. Update OK
394944 kb OK - this counting usually freezes, at various random values – unless I choose to skip memory test or enter Setup...

OK three then!!! If I end up slaveing to another PC do I need to worry about any viruses or the like that may be on the sickly HHD.

You had better test the memory modules

Since your computer won't boot, get this:
http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

Let MemTest run...2 hours is good.
It will appear to hang from time to time for the long tests...
There are 8 tests altogether and you need the results from all of them.