These are sort of good diagnostic steps if it really is a hardware 
problem.  If it's a software problem, it's not going to show up as a slave 
or USB enclosure, because that's not where the machine is booting from.

  A similar idea might be to put a fresh hard drive in your machine (and 
install a clean copy of the OS to that...), and slave the existing drive to 
it.  You can gradually copy your existing files to the new drive (generally 
it will be better to reinstall applications rather than try to move them), 
and at some point when you've salvaged everything you need, reformat the old 
drive.

  [If it's a motherboard problem, it will show up with the new drive as 
well, and then you'll know.]

David Gillett


On 13 Feb 2006 at 19:42, Lewis c Emerson wrote:

> Folks,
> 
> I've been frustrated for many month with a sick computer (Athelon 900 MHz
> CPU running Windows-Me)  that kept freezing up more and more frequently
> and finally became just too much trouble to keep trying to reboot again
> and again for the very few times that it actually would be usable for
> short periods before freezing again.  I took it to a local repair shop
> and paid them $30 for their info that they couldn't get it to boot either
> after some unknown attempts to get it up and running.  All that I got
> from them that was positive was that the power supply was OK.  They said
> it might be the motherboard or a software problem. 
> 
> Here's my idea as to how to isolate the problem - so will ask for
> comments. 
> 
> Idea #1 - Remove the hard drive from the sick machine and slave it to the
> hard drive in my older Windows-95 machine (with a Pentium CPU) and see if
> the problem also appears here - if not, the problem  would be the
> motherboard or associated hardware in the W-Me machine.  If it causes the
> same problem (freeze ups) in the W-95 machine it would be something on
> the hard drive from the W-Me machine. 
> 
> Idea #2. - Do essentially the same thing, but instead of slaving the W-Me
> hard drive to the one in the W-95 machine, buy a hard drive USB "cage"
> and put the W-95 hard drive in the cage connected to the W-Me machine and
> see what happens.
> 
> I guess I'm displaying my ignorance here, but hate to give up what I
> already have on hand and, there are a few things on the W-Me hard drive
> that I'd like to recover.
> 
> If either of these ideas are kuku can one of you kind folks suggest what
> in-house diagnostics I might perform here without additional costs.  I'm
> kinda elderly and can't spend too much on this. 
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Lewis Emerson
> 
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