PCA Forums

So I go to work on a neighbors computer, they're my little sisters friends so I figure why not (even though I hate working on other peoples machines) I get over there, they complain it's slow (no shit, this is an old HP 6460, 400MHz celeron with....get this.........96mb of RAM!) Well, I do the normal shit and figure I might as well through some more RAM in there since I have it....that'll be the biggest jump in "performance" they can get with this old wanker.

Well, I pop in a 256meg stick on top of a 64 that was already in there (only two DIMMS) and......no boot! YAY! So I take it out, put in a spare 64, atleast now they can have 128 (I know, 32meg more, probably isn't worth it but I figured I'd give it a shot) It works....ok, something goes right. I put it all back together, start it up and get

"Invalid System disk
Press any key to continue"

FAWK! Kinda clueless at this point, I spend some time in BIOS (even though I never changed anything to begin with!) Finally figure I'll ditch the RAM I put in there and put their RAM back in so its all back how it was when I got in there. I do that....same problem. Take the box home, tear out the drive and shove it into a spare box I have and check it out:

<img src=http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hipnotic_ ... fuckme.JPG>

All the dirs are screwed and I can only imagine a format will solve it :| I tried scandisk and it tried to fix 50 million screw ups and I finally said screw it and exited out. So, I spend some time out of my day to help some one and in return, I make myself look like an ass and lose some time packing for hte PCA lan :| :|

KILL ME!!KL!KL!LK!K:L!:KLJLK:AJALKLJ ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

Win98 ? If so use a Win98 boot disk and type in sys c: at the A:\ prompt. After it says System transferred, reboot it.

Drive is probably Farked - reformat. I'd run DocMemory before leaving that new stick of ram in there though.

Possible that extra stick you put in didn't work (and still doesn't) properly and it's causing BIOS to corrupt the drive. Drive may have been fine but with the RAM in there the directory was being read wrong. Doing a Scandisk with the ram in there would just have corrupted it worse.

Other possibilities on what happened:

- Dirty or corroded IDE connectors. Working inside moved them a bit causing poor contact and data corruption. Disconnect & reconnect to clean them, or replace them if you have spares.
Again, drive may have been fine but connector was making poor contact and reading directories wrong but nothing was wrong with the drive. Scandisking it with the poor connection would have screwed it up.

- Could be drive has bad sectors and just a bad coincidence.

Remember my motto: "No good turn goes unpunished!"

Thanks guys....I just did the ol Format & Forget trick. I didn't think about doing any memory tests, then again when I had all the original memory in there, there shouldn't have been a problem? And yeah, I'm sure scandisk started making it worse, I was more just wanting to see if there were any bad sectors (so I could just replace the drive) but I didn't get that far, heh. At that point I was pretty pissed and just wanted (and am still wanting) to just get it back up and running as much as it was before I touched it, cause I gotta leave for the PCA LAN here in a couple hours. Lesson one, don't work on a PCA when you're steamin' pissed, it's too easy to format! I did try to ghost it via peer-to-peer but was having problems finding a driver for their NIC and said screw it since it was already reading it wrong to begin with....don't even know why I tried

They have DSL, which I've not messed with at all, so I'm hoping it won't be too hard to atleast get it online before I leave... ...and if they need any programs installed they can either do it themselves or I'll just get it done when I get back.

Thanks for listening to my rant I was so frikkin' pissed, heh.

Been there, done that.

Unless it's XP you need to install a PPPOE client for the DSL modem - unless they're going through a router.

One should have come with the DSL modem on a CD.

You also need to know their user name and password.