hardware prob. any suggestions?

B

bushdiecker

New Member
I built my computer about 4 yrs ago, ran great til it stopped running great. Put new power supply, HD, reloaded OS, took it to comp shop and they told me the HD was bad, when I reminded them that I just replaced it, he told me that a bad motherboard could damage sectors on HD. Is that possible? Oh, yeah, another prob is that the CPU flatlines at 100% from the get go, CPU problem? Appreciate any advice anyone can offer. thx
 
You can always download the hard drive makers disk diagnostic utility and run it on the drive to test it. You could have a bad install of windows or a corrupt software installation that causes cpu usage of 100 percent. If the diagnostic says everything is ok, I would do a fresh install and watch the cpu usage at that point and then little by little add software until you see a difference and then you found the culprit.
 
johnb35 said:
You can always download the hard drive makers disk diagnostic utility and run it on the drive to test it. You could have a bad install of windows or a corrupt software installation that causes cpu usage of 100 percent. If the diagnostic says everything is ok, I would do a fresh install and watch the cpu usage at that point and then little by little add software until you see a difference and then you found the culprit.
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the CPU started running that way on the old hard drive which i was using for a couple of years. Thanks for the advice. I will try it again. Any other ideas? Would a bad motherboard cause the CPU to operate that way?:confused:
 
I seriously doubt a motherboard would cause bad sectors on a drive... perhaps if the computer died mid-write you might have some logical issues, but nothing a zero-write couldn't fix... But also realize just because a drive is new doesn't mean it's going to work. I've had drives die right out of the box.

Does the CPU flatline right after installation? Have you tried reloading (again) or using another OS such as Linux. If you have a CPU problem, I seriously doubt you'd get anything from the machine.
 
It is possible that you might have a bad ribbon or cable from your hd to mb. They don't do it very often, but it happens.
 
I'm not very familiar with LINUX other than i know that it exists...will it run windows appications? I primarily use my machine for gaming. Could my XP install disc get corrupted over time that would result in a bad install? If that is the case, I'm considering Vista, although I've been told that I should wait until 7 comes out...
 
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