Ed,

Quick question...  Have you run Scandisk and Defrag yet?  Back in the 486
days I used a Windblows 3.1 machine with a 200MB HD.  I worked on the
machine for about nine months when all of a sudden it would not boot any
more (I tried cold-booting several times).  I booted to a floppy and was
able to access the HD.  I ran Scandisk and Defrag, rebooted the machine, and
it booted fine like nothing was ever wrong.  May not help, but it certainly
won't hurt.

I go through a couple of steps when I run Defrag, btw.  First, I reboot the
machine and press F8 as it's booting to get the boot menu (actually, I have
most machines I work with set up to show the boot menu automatically on
boot-up).  I select Command Prompt, and once booted I delete the Win386.swp
file.  This is the swap file that Windblows uses (you do have a fixed size
for this file, don't you?).  I then reboot again, press F8 for the boot
menu, and start Windblows in Safe Mode.  I do a CTRL+ALT+DEL to make sure
nothing else is running (when you boot to Safe Mode, nothing else but
"Explorer" should show up here).  I then run Defrag.  Oh yeah, I make sure
to turn off my screen saver too.

The reason I delete the swap file is because if this file is large it eats
up a lot of time when defragging.  Much more time than the process I just
described to delete it takes.

I hope this helps.

Kyle


>From: Ed Thomasson <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: [PCBUILD] bad hard drive ???
>Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2000 15:02:50 -0500
>
>Using Soyo SY-5EMA+ V1.0
>AMD K6-2 450
>128 meg PC-100
>Samsung 4.3
>
>Lately, when opening programs, my computer takes up to a minute or two at
>times (not always) to open an additional program. The hard drive light
>lights up and the mouse freezes until the program opens. Sometimes this
>happens when I am trying to save a program and others when I am just
>opening
>a new one. Twice I got the following message:
>
>
>                 Disk Write Error
>
>     Unable to write to disk in drive C:
>     data or files may be lost
>     press any key to continue,
>
>and had to just turn it off and lose what I was trying to save.
>
>Once it was C:, the other time E:, both of which are on the same hard
>drive.
>Does this necessarily mean the hard drive is going south, or could
>something
>else be causing the error? I am keeping everything backed up, and am
>planning on keeping it til it dies, if that is what it is doing.
>Once while starting the computer, it stopped at the windows screen and
>didn't finish booting, but the drive light didn't stay on. Started it in
>safe mode, then shut down and restarted normally. Couple of times when the
>power went off and back on, took a couple of hours fiddling with it to get
>it to boot.
>thanks
>ed

________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                  http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org