Computer Problems: How I Fixed Mine (and Will It Happen Again?)

[qwpoi]

Yesterday my computer was stuck in an endless loop of restarting, getting stuck before XP could fully load, and then restarting. Turned it off. This morning, when pressing the power on button, nothing happened. At all. Yes, it was plugged in and everything. Well, I took the case off, and cleaned all the dust out with a can of compressed air, and it started working again. The drive seemed to be working unusually hard, but perhaps that is my own paranoia. If something is wrong with either hard drive I will scream because I'm broke and I just bought those damn things.

Now, is this indicative of a larger problem that will come back to haunt me in the middle of something important?

(When it stopped working and went into that cycle of restart it was in the middle of transferring a bunch of CD images from 1 hard drive to another, in case that's important.)

 

[dduardo]

Do you have surge protects connected to you computer?

"working unusually hard" - Does that mean you hear strange sounds from the harddrive.?Do you hear it skipping? Do you hear it spinning faster than it should?

Sounds from a harddrive is not good. If you just got the drives why don't you return them?

 

[qwpoi]

Well by 'just got new hard drives' I really meant I got them recently, as in this summer. The 90 day warranty is still good on my master drive so I'll return it if I find something wrong with that but the other one I've had for about 4 months.

I didn't really hear any clicking, just some loud whirring that was definintely coming from the hard drive and not the fan...

And it's entirely broken now...that must have been a provisional reprieve from a dead computer, because the minute I tried backing up my data it all went to **** and wouldn't even start in safe mode...I plan on taking the comp to my university technology thing...see if they can help me, or at least reassure me that my drives are still in working order. I Have a hunch that it's the cd rom...

 

[Lyuokdea]

A Problem with the CD-ROM shouldn't cause a crash like the one you're discribing. What happens when you power on the computer now? Anything? If its a hard drive problem it should at least POST, that is where the computer shows some info in an MS-DOS type form, usually it tells you what Graphics card you have, and how much RAM and such, if it doesn't do that, it is unlikely that it is a hard drive problem either. If it does that, but crashes while loading the OS, then a HD problem is a possibility.

EDIT: Also, I forgot to mention, just to make sure it isn't a CD problem, just unplug the CD-ROM drive and try to boot up, to do this, there should be two different lines connected to the CD-ROM drive inside the case, one has 4 metal inserts that plug into 4 metal prongs on the CD-ROM drive, that is the power line, and the other one is the data line, make sure you unplug both of them from the CD-ROM drive, and then power on your system, a CD-ROM is not needed for your computer to work, so you can test if that is the problem by running your computer without it.