Just about two years ago I picked up a new hard drive, relegating the old one to file storage and the odd game. Figuring the existing install of Winblows on the clunker wouldn't cause any problems, I went ahead and installed a fresh copy on the new HDD. Unfortunately, I believe this may have been one mega blunder. Since then, my old HDD has gone down the crapper with a very large Catch 22. I can't run scandisk or defrag on it (drive physically locks up, and the whole system along with it), plus, I can't pull the sucker out. Last time I tried, the mobo wouldn't recognize anything on boot. Almost as if it was simply displaying the boot screen as a taunt. I can get into the BIOS, but again, it shows no drive is attached and working. Not even the floppy drive shows up! Resetting the CMOS jumper and waiting ten minutes usually worked any time I had serious trouble, but even THAT didn't work.
Adding insult to stupidity, I can tell the newer install of Winblows (98SE) is pulling stuff off the old drive. Here lately it's been running scandisk on boot for drive D: (the clunker). While I'd usually let this run out on the new HDD, the old one will stop responding completely after a few seconds of doing this. So I've been skipping it, resulting in some minor DirectX hiccups (ddhelp crashes while sitting at the desktop is the worst thus far). Otherwise the system does run, and oddly enough it is rather stable. The UT2k4 demo doesn't even cause any trouble, other than a somewhat long load time. But given that UT2k4 is a lot more intensive than 2k3, it's kind of obvious. Targetware also runs lickety-split with no SNAFUs.
Oh, and before you say "just format the thing" or "swap mobos", think again. While I can look at the odd file now and then, I can't do anything intensive with the clunker. And to boot, a new mobo is out since I'm out of money.
Any ideas?
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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight SchoolPut the P-61B in Aces High
