HD problem after all?

[samstown22]

to make a long problem as short as possible,

november:got a new stick of 512 ram from roommate for my almost two year old box, soon thereafter, computer started shutting down at random times, usually only when i was gaming. at that time thought it was overheating...went on vacation for a week, came home and computer wouldnt boot at all. all i got was a blue screen telling me to run chkdsk /f. friends said maybe it was ram, since that was only change.

built new computer, hoping ram or mb was problem, and still get same boot screen. im not complaining about my new box, but i do need my old HD datas.

i tried making a bootdisk to check it out from dos, but it says i dont have any drives other than my floppy..just keep getting invalid drive msg...also, if i push reset, my box beeps and shuts down. sometimes it just decides it is done. this has to be the hd cuz everything in box is brand new except for hd

all i need is a way to get everything off of primary drive so i can format it, without losing anything i have on slave. and if at all possible i dont want to install OS on slave. and even if i get around to formatting c drive, will that be the end of my crashing, or is my problem deeper than that?

thanks in advance for the answer to my six month old problem...you guys are awesome, as always

 

[narafa]

Plug out your HD and then plug it as a slave drive into another computer, copy all the needed data you want, and then format it.

 

[samstown22]

ok, formatting in progress, but my system is still acting strange....

a normal power-up produces one short beep on boot. a power-down produces two long beeps on shutdown.

after repeated attempts, im getting this result: power-up1 -- two immediate long beeps, folowed by shutdown. power-up2 -- normal power-up and boot. rinse and repeat.

WHY?!?!?!?!

the reason i ask here is because this is similar to what was happening before i rebuilt, and the only constant being my hd. as i said, format is in progress, and hopefully it goes away, but im still baffled.