Hi I was wandering if anybody could possibly suggest any ways I can fix up my computer. I have an AMD powered pc that is about 2 years old, I was given it after it crashed (ie required a clean install of os) on my mum a couple of times and since she couldn't afford to lose her work she decided to replace the system.

I reformatted and tried installing ME on the system and it would often fail during the installation saying it could not copy from the source drive, despite having made it part of the way through. Eventually after numerous attempts it did install and I got all the further drivers installed on the system, it seemed to work fine but then a couple of days later during boot it stopped saying a vital sytem file "dosdrv" was corrupt and it needed to be restored by reinstalling windows. This made no sense to me as the system had had no new software installed so nothing couldve corrupted it.

As a test I disconnected the CD drive and booted the machine, it successfully got into windows, when I connected a new CD drive believing the problem was that the other was broken the computer hung on booting into windows.

I figured maybe the problem was that ME didnt like the Pc set up so I tried downloading a Live CD of Slax Linux, it boots occasionally but only maybe once in five tries, giving a message that there was a crc error during extracting of Linux from the CD.

It sounds like I have a dodgy CD drive but whichever one I use the same problems occur. I presume then that there is some problem with how the CD drives are communicating with the motherboard? is there a way to fix this or is this PC just too far gone? the CD drives I have used have always been connected as the Secondary Master so that should be ok.

any help would be much appreciated, I dont want to waste any further time on this machine if it is just not going to work

thanks in advance!

Johan

Re-check all of your cables on your drives
Borrow another CD rom to test

Don't give up - it probably is either your CD drive or your hard drive

thanks for the encouragement

I think I may have tracked it down to a faulty ram chip...I checked it out using the tool at memtest386.com

very useful indeed, it boots before any os and automatically scans all the ram and reports errors. Turns out one of the chips over the course of a few years developed quite a number of corrupt sectors (I'm no pc expert but thats what it seemed to suggest)

You gotta love memtest386

Afraid it sounds like you need new RAM,