help my copmuter has been taken over by the borg!!!!

[zmerlinz]

Hi

bloody thing, i add a new start up sound to my computer about Locutus of Borg taking over my computer, now the little buggers have got into my computer and reeking havoc everywhere, i have had to re-start my computer 7 times in the space of 4 hours today due to it locking up or simplying crashing!!! , what is going on ?????

i used to have WINME but that died so i moved bac to WIN98 and the thing still crashes, i think that i will go and use one of the Atari STs for a little while, it might make me appreciate this computer a little more

[denniswrenn]

One solution... Get Windows 2000

[zmerlinz]

i would love to, but every time i go to install it, it crashes, people think that it is my chip set on my motherboard

[denniswrenn]

Do you try to install from windows, or DOS?

[CiberTHuG]

Uhm.... why install from Windows or DOS? Can you boot from the CD-ROM?

I say get a copy of FDisk (or your favorite) and destroy any data on your harddrive. Wipe it clean. Then do a fresh install. I don't ever suggest doing an upgrade, especially not moving from a Win9x OS like WinME to a WinNT OS like W2K.

*shrug*

I will warn you though that I've had W2K refuse to install if the power management chipset was not up to date. I had to get a BIOS upgrade just to get W2K to install.

My brother's NEC (read: POS) has a screwy set up. It didn't want W2K, either, but we raped it, made it take it (bad imagery, but pretty accurate metaphoricaly).

His machine still crashes a lot if he closes the case, but that is a different matter. Something is grounding or overheating.

[denniswrenn]

Originally posted by zmerlinz
windows, because i have to use my external cd-writer and it doesn't work in DOS

[CiberTHuG]

I know it doesn't work in DOS, but... can he boot from it? I'm assuming the answer is no.

'Course, you could slap in a used CD-ROM that you can boot from (read: ATAPI) and install and then remove the extra CD-ROM.

[zmerlinz]

it is an external cd-writer tha plugs into a scsi device via the parallel port, i cannot boot from it as i need windows to load the software for it, and there are no spare cd-roms in the house that i can use at this minute, so i will try Dennis' approach later, oh and i did try it from a clean install once and it didn't like that either

[CiberTHuG]

Okay, so your CDW is on SCSI and your BIOS won't boot it. Is your HDD(s) SCSI? And it boots them?

Yes, it may be impossible to boot to your CDW, but blame that device. There are standards which will let devices be bootable, even SCSI.

I got spoiled I guess by this nice DEC server. Dual channel SCSI, 5 to 8 5GB HDDs in RAID 5 and a bootable CD-ROM.

'Course, it took four hours to build it as an NT server running MQ/Series, but that is beside the point.

[zmerlinz]

sorry i wasn't clear enough, my cd-writer is scsi and it needs to plug into my parallel port, so there is a special cable that i use scsi to parallel, and in order for this cable and my cd-writer to work i need the software in windows to load.

your server sounds nice though

[Tygur]

I just wanted to say that it is possible for the problem to be the network card. I went through an enormous amount of trouble with my computer (couldn't install any version of windows, anything that was installed kept getting currupted) and eventually lost everything on the stupid machine..and it was all because of the network card..

[zmerlinz]

that is quite interesting tygur, my computer has been crashing a lot since i changed my network card, do you happen to know why the network card was causing all of these problems, was it due to wrong drivers being installed ??

[Tygur]

I went out and bought a new one (It was still the same kind) and put it in and I was still getting the same problems. But when I put it in a different PCI slot, everything worked fine.

[zmerlinz]

i might give that a go and see if it fixes the problem