Hey im new here,

Ill try and keep this short (edit: my OS is XPprosp2)

1 - My hdd just failed, its an old ata but it has all my programms installed, when the PC boots up, it takes ten times longer at POST, then it 'verifies DMI pool data' for 30 seconds when usualy its a split second.

It comes up something like drive not found or something and to input the repair disk. Ive read that all i have to do is stick in XP disk, press R, and type in

FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:
COPY CDDrive:\I386\NTLDR C:\
COPY CDDrive:\I386|NTDETECT.COM C:\
BOOTCFG /rebuild

Great, problem is the boot from CD takes ages to appear, then the 'installing windows' line of text takes ages to appear and when its on the blue screen and has loaded the drivers etc, when it asks to install/repair etc, when i hit R, it says it cannot find a hard drive and the installation is forced to quit, so i cannot even enter the above.

Also when i swap it to slave and use my vista drive as master, it is viewed as 10mb in the installation of vista, yet when i accessed the slave drive from my Computer in Vista i was able to retrieve my files and back them up from vista, and it reads the proper 160Gig or so

I thought it is a boot problem but how can i fix it if i cant run the repair console? If it helps ive a few more hdds lieing about, i was thinking i could perform the proceedure above in repair console and copy and paste the files into the corrupt XP disk? would that work?

2 - When i watch a movie or play games, after around 30-40mins my sound either starts to crackle or speeds up to twice or three times the speed it is meant to play at. I use a set of 640U silverline usb headset headphones. This problem never happened before my last build (i got a new mobo etc) and i don think its a driver problem, my friend has the exact same problem. I fix it by going into its little sounds features in sys tray and click on speakers then back to headphones, is there something conflicting in bios perhaps?

3 - If i kill the power to my PC by the plugs the bios gets an error (i cant remember off hand) but basically reverts to its default settings i.e. norm clock speed, date 2003, floppy disk enabled etc. Ive read it could be the small battrey but this mobo is brand new! could it be the PS? It recommmends a 450 watt im using 300 watt IIRC and its a 24pin while im using a 20pin (it says it can support it)


Im in a hurry so if anyone wants me to elaborate on specs etc ill post them later on, also should i split the questions into seperate threads? Didnt want to clog the place up

cheers in advance, r34ch

1 As you have a backup it isn't a big step anymore to a reinstall of XP right? You could also do a clean install of XP on another HDD and copy the files in the windowsdirectory to the old XPinstall on the other HDD (not sure which files to copy though, probably at least system32directory)...
2 Dunno
3 I probably don't know what you mean because I'm Dutch, but what do you mean?

Robin

Thanks for the reply! Ill try copying the sys32 folder over then to the corrupt XP

by 'kill the power to my PC by the plugs' I mean to turn the PC completely off, not even on standbye

cheers r34ch

About question 3, you could buy a cheap battery to replace the one on your MOBO, just to check if the battery is causing the loss of settings...

Robin