HA! Very true. It's a compaq presario 2500. It's my aunts (what a horrible company)
Printable View
HA! Very true. It's a compaq presario 2500. It's my aunts (what a horrible company)
This is exactly the type of thing that bad memory will produce..the original information is corrupted, but the things written to the hard drive remain the same. RAM by it's nature is flushed every time the computer is shut down..it cannot hold data with no power, and a cmos virus would have made the machine impossible to boot anyway. Have you tried the memory test proposed?Quote:
In fact, why I think it's an MBR virus and not memory is that every time I reinstall the error is different but reproducible upon rebooting.
DOS only recognizes FAT and FAT32 partitions, not NTFS..if instead of doing that you boot from a standard windows 98 bootdisk, and type in fdisk, it will show up as a non dos partition.Quote:
If I put in a boot disk (i.e. dos 6.22 disk from bootdisk.com) and type in c: I get the message "the system cannot find the specified drive" So fdisk here is impossible from here.
Ah nice thanks, I thought I was going crazy with the bootdisk.
The very extensive memtest is running and should be done sometime next year.... No errors as of yet. thanks, and please don't forget about me!!! :)
5 passes of memtest86 v3.2 without a single error.
A couple virus programs on the boot CD (Mcafee, f-prot, avg) report no virii in the boot sector.....
I would let memtest run overnight to stress the ram and reveal any underlying problems
Then try the Windows Memory diagnostic, It helped me find problems that memtest did not pick up
Test your laptops CPU with prime95, Maybe the level two cache is going south and giving you these errors
Check and see if your CD rom drive is working OK, Maybe the laser is geting weak and causing these install errors, You did try two cds , Are they factory cds or burned copies ?
Hope this helps
Nothing yet. I hate to just throw out a laptop, but sheesh! Redhat 9 installation wouldn't go past the first driver load.
I keep getting this sense that there's a hidden partition that persists that contains some kind of compaq system recovery that's screwing me up. I tried to fdisk it with fat32 and a partition showed up that ended at sector 64. Likewise, when I try xp installs, there is some 8mb "unpartitioned space." That wouldn't make sense if this was a brand new hard drive but I think the drive was installed by compaq. My ultimate boot CD doesn't seem to have an option to zero fill absolutely everything. Anyone know of some good utitilities to take everything off, including any record in the partition tables, etc.? (zap and kill look good but won't cover 40gb). I want the whole drive to be nothing. Maybe I could send it through an MRI, or something with enough flux to kill it, perahaps a particle accelerator? The center of the earth?
Gateway has a nice utility that will do Harddrive diagnostics and has an option to Zero out the entire drive. http://support.gateway.com/support/d...m=GWSCAN&st=kw The nice thing about this one is it doesn't seem to be brand specific and I have used this on many different computer brands. Otherwise the HardDrive manufacturer usually has diagnostic/zero out utilities for download from their sites. Is there any complete system diagnostics that you can run to test the over all system like motherboard componants and processor.
Cool. Yeah, a lot of these utilities are proprietary and do care about brand names, I got sick of that game so I booted to linux and gave it the old
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512
So, I'll see what happens. Will take forever I'm sure.
If I recall right on Compaq hard drives there are two partitions, one contains the BIOS information when you press the key sequence to get into it. The other partition is the usable part of the drive.
To confirm the drive has two partitions you should use a Ghost boot disk and look at the hard drive.
If it does indeed have two partitions then your BIOS information is on the first one. If you use a new drive you don't have the BIOS information to tell the computer where to boot from.
NO GO. After a random pass and a zero fill of the whole drive, same old story. Yet the 8mb partition persists! Can bios be writing this automatically?
There's plenty of gripes about the system recovery partition out there, and about the reverse engineered bios for compaq. I can't figure out anything though. I don't even know the mobo manufacturer or if there is a non-compaq bios available.
If anyone you know ever buys a compaq, give them a gun and a bullet: they're gonna need it, and not for the computer either.
Oh and Tyamada, from what I gather, that "BIOS partition" is old news for compaq, like prior to 98. They use CMOS now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by granto
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why is there an 8-megabyte (MB) partition after setting up the hard disk partitions during the MS-DOS portion of WindowsXP setup?
A:
This is the space at the end of the hard disk that needs to be there for the ability to create Dynamic Disks. Normally there is some space remaining at the end of the hard disk. It used to be hidden from the user. Windows® 2000 and Windows® XP have to guarantee the space is there.