Member Panel

Not sure where to begin, but here goes. First off I have a AMD Athlon 2200 processor, 1 Gig of memory, XP Pro O/S, ATI 9600 256MB video card, 2 hard drives (1 maxtor with 120gb and the other a maxtor 200gb) in a Raidmax case w/3 case fans. I have Norton Anti Virus, and run adware, spybot and CCleaner all the time for maintance. Home assembled, not a major company. I reloaded a complete image of my C drive from a backup I made with Ghost 9.0 from my D drive using Ghost 10.0 (Symantic rep. said the versions were backward compatable). This was my first mistake. I should have left well enough alone, but I was trying to go back in time when I had less junk on my PC and made this image when it was petty clean. Starting the very next day I could not get the computer to boot up. I was getting a series of 6 or 7 beeps, after switching off the power supply, unplugging and replugging the PC I got it to bootup. It booted up ok and windows started, great. No not great, I noticed I lost my scanner which is ran off a scsi card. I tried to reload the drivers over and over again and could never get the scanner to work again so I ended up buying another scanner, (USB interface) and it worked ok. But now the computer started to crash (or freeze) more and more. It would not bootup some times at all, just a black screen no beeping noises either and if it did, would go through the boot process then crash when windows started up. Some days it would take about 20 to 30 tries for it to fianally startup. It's been getting worse as time went on. Now I can't even startup the system it gets to startup and freezes.

I've swapped out the video card, installed a new motherboard battery, changed the Hard drive cables, removed all the PCI cards (sound, TV tuner, Scsi,) to make sure it wasn't those. Now I don't know if it's a bad video card driver (computer isn't on long enough to reload) motherboard or power supply.

I was going to replace the power supply first, but wanted to check with your forum first. Sorry for the long post.

hello crazycramer and welcome to pchf

can you try booting up the pc with just the basics cpu,ram,power supply and the motherboard of course to see if it gets power

genie3251

When you say basics, do you want me to disconnect the DVD drives? And you mean running the video card of course with monitor correct?
Thanks for the help.

hey crazycramer

you can do that to see if it will stop freezing also how old is your power supply

genie3251

Genie3251
My power supply is 4 years old. I thought I tried this, but I took a stick of ram out and the system started up ok. I plugged in my usb devices (ie APC backup cord, Joystick etc. ) and was ok until I plugged in my scanner when the screen went black. I unplugged it, restarted it without the scanner and system came back to life. I did a system restore 3 days ago and it said the restore was unscessfull, but I did notice some files did restore. So I'm thinking I lost my scanner drivers, (they were installed after the restore time I had gone back to) So maybe the drivers just have to be reloaded and that cause my screen to go black. I was just happy to get back on without the scanner that I was able to run a full scan of Norton anti virius just to check to see if I happen to be infected. No viriuses detected. I went over my emails, backed up some files on a DVD in case I crashed again and everything went ok. I think maybe it was just a bad stick of ram. I will try to reload the scanner drivers again and see if system boots up ok. I'm still thinking it might be the power supply beginning to go, or maybe the processor. At least I was able to backup my importatant files in case it's my hard drive. I let you know tommorow where I stand and maybe can close this case. What do you think? Thanks for your help so far....

Looking forward to your reply CrazyCramer!

Well something is wrong but I cannot figure it out. When I connect my camera or scanner to a USB port, my system freezes. I tried to reload all the software but still freezes. I am clueless as to what might be wrong. All I know is that my system has not acted normal since I loaded my C image that was created by Nortorn Ghost. So I'm not sure if this is a software problem or a hardware problem. The system is running ok right now, but I can't hook up my camera or scanner without the system freezing.
I give up. Is there a way to test the powersupply? or the motherboard?