mcjeff215 Posted February 6, 2005 Posted February 6, 2005 You have several possibilities on what happened. 1) You have a virus. 2) Your wininit file is corrurpt 3)You have a hardware problem. I have had roughly the same thing happen with #2 and #3. The hardware problem I had was a bad fan on the heatsink for the CPU. The computer would do a thermal shutdown. Those old AMD chips could be real heat generators. It's tough to sort these out when you can't get started. So instead of throwing that computer off the balcony, I recommend when you get your new system, you take your old hard drive and re-install Windows on it. Then take it out of your comp and save it. If you had a backup HD now, you could connect it to your comp. This would instantly prove it was a hardware problem or not. After that you could copy your good wininit file to the other hard drive, which would insure it is good. You could use virus software on the old harddrive to scan the bad one.. Also, if you only have one comp, it allows you to connect to the internet to seek out help. At minumum, when you get out of this, get an image of your harddrive using Ghost. It easily beats this frustration that happened when you are trying to get running again. One last thing. If you are going to keep a HD back up, make sure it goes with the motherboard and cpu you are going to use it as a backup on. I've tried using HD's from other systems (I've got 4) and they tend not to like to go from one system to another especially if one has an AMD chip in it and the other has an Intel chip in it. They tend to not boot into Windows. 229616[/snapback] You can pop HD's around, but you'll need to reinstall 99.9% of the time due to Windows' funky hardware abstraction and whatnot. The problem isn't with the HD, it's with the OS on the HD. If you add an additional HD, format it, and use it as an independent storage device (i.e. don't boot from it), you can swap at will. I rsync both my laptop and my wife's laptop to my big PowerMac once a week or so. If anything blows up, I can just reinstall the OS and move my home directory back over. -Jeff
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