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7911
January 18th, 2011 15:00
computer won't boot win xp
I have a dimension 8300. lately, it refuses to boot windows. it keeps giving me a message saying one of my hard drives was not detected. I have 3 hard drives: 2 160gb pata drives and 1 750gb sata drive, drives C, D, and G. it keeps saying it can't find my D drive and sometimes my C drive as well. the g drive is the boot drive, so I usually keep going with the boot procedure. Once it gets to the win xp screen before the account log-in screen, it just sits there. One time I let it run for >30 min and still nothing. this happens even when using safe mode. I've been trying to figure out what the problem is and fix it. after all, a computer that won't boot the OS is just a useless heap of metal and plastic. I recently added 2gb of ddr1 pc3200 ram, so perhaps that's the cause? in addition, for a while before the computer completely failed, I would get BSODs every time I tried to wake the computer up from hibernating. apparently this was due to a driver issue, maybe the graphics driver. any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks!
fireberd
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January 19th, 2011 05:00
This sounds like potentially multiple problems. I would reconfigure it back to the "basic" 8300 and work from there. The PATA drives should be set for Cable Select, not Master/Slave so if you changed them, that is one place to start. Only have one hard drive connected initially to see how it works. As the original hard drive was probably a PATA drive, if you have one that is bootable use that for the test and troubleshooting. Same way with memory - go back to the original memory for testing.
One issue with many Dell's is the memory brand. Dell's can have a history of problems with some non-Dell brands of memory. For this reason we recommend Crucial Memory as it is one brand that is guaranteed to work in Dells.
Hibernate actually "powers off" the PC and really doesn't buy you much. It was designed for Laptops to conserve battery power and wasn't intended for Desktops. Are you actually referring to "Standby"? In the 8300's day there were many problems with Standby and the most frequent suggestion, including a Dell forum moderator was to NOT use Standby because of the flakey problems. The reccomendation was to "power off" the Monitor and hard drive at whatever time interval you wanted and nothing else (I used to set mine at 30 minutes). Newer OS' and hardware have overcome most of the standby problems, but with the older systems it is an issue.
vic5014
56 Posts
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January 19th, 2011 17:00
The RAM is gskill, but it worked ok for a couple of weeks before dying completely. I actually do use hibernate even though its a desktop. my folks insist on turning the power off completely when not in use (including shutting off the powerstrip) and I just got sick of starting from scratch every morning. I guess I could try removing the new ram and one or both pata drives since the 750gb sata drive is actually my boot drive. I don't think I still have either the original hard drive (40gb) or memory (only 2x256mb).
vic5014
56 Posts
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January 24th, 2011 17:00
The problem appears to have been one of the 1gb sticks of ram I added. now I just have to figure out how to test it to see what's wrong and if I can get it replaced.