[Hailstorm]

i havent been able to play in the server lately because my old pc died bah and my so called newer pc has a problem, it has an ati radeon x800 xt all in wonder video card that runned Jedi academy extremely well but now everything lags like theres no hardware acceleration even windows lags like hell. I dont know what my brother did to the pc while i was away, but i have formatted the pc i have installed the new drivers for the motherboard and the video card and nothing, 3d games wont even start :S so i hope that someone knows what to do to solve this so i can play JA again soon :/ thx

[Sparky]

Have you installed the correct graphics drivers?

[Chantelle]

Yes make sure that is right!! make sure its digitally signed aswell

also START | RUN dxdiag

run those tests..

I assume 2D is okay?? (High res, high colours etc)

[Melissa]

X800X isnt a very good gaming card to be honest some of the lag may be down to the fact the card isnt designed for gaming

[Seive]

If you're looking for a budget card, check out the Nvidia 7600 GS or, if you have a bit more money, the GT. Both are reliable cards in my experience. I think my GS ran me about $100? While it's not bleeding edge, it's a very nice start.

[Melissa]

I suspect you have posted that on the wrong thread

[Seive]

You would be correct. ><

[Chantelle]

Seive you have a memory like a .....

[Seive]

Fish?

[Chantelle]

no memory like a Seive

[Hailstorm]

the problem seemed to be that the ati program didnt install the drivers properly and blablabla anyway that problem is almost solved what really bugs me now iiiiis that windows doesnt boot, it doesnt have anything to do with the first problem.

i downloaded a program called cpu-z to check some specs and when i executed it windows froze and a weird beep-like sound came from the speakers but nothing from the pc itself,

i pressed the reset button and the windows logo, showing that is booting windows, doesnt appear, just a black screen, i can get to bios by pressing f2 everything looks fine in there :S i dont know what the problem is! i took out the sound card the dvd drive and left the video card the ram sticks, the proc the floppy drive and the hard drive trying to figure out whats causing it not to boot and nothing :/ i tried to create a boot disk with my other pc to make it boot from the disk and nothing the windows cd doesnt work either :/

[Chantelle]

can you boot into safe mode firstly?

You may need to insert you CD of windows boot to it and repair (not reinstall just repair)


Of course the other point is if this is a new computer you shoudl take it back saying it doesnt work properly given that both the graphics card do not work and the system has went awol.

[Hailstorm]

i cant boot into safe mode, i tried to boot from the windows cd, it says 'press any key to boot from cd' i pressed any key and a black screen appeared again and i waited for 15min and nothing happens, theres only a black screen and nothing else.

every time i power on the pc theres a sound coming from inside the pc, at first i thought it was the hd locking itself :S but now i just dont know what it is. today i'll try connecting the hd to another pc to see if it still works. bah bah bah

[Chantelle]

next thing is reseat your graphics card

but seriously check teh BIOS your HDD is being detected, although saying that it would still proceed windows setup to a certain level before that.

Given that the PC is new you should take it back on warranty

[Hailstorm]

its not a new pc, its a 1 year old pc =P i have checked teh bios and it detects the HD, unfortunaly i cant see if the data in the HD is ok because my other pc doesnt have the SATA thingies to connect the HD :/

i disconnected everything except the video card and the HD and everything sounds fine for 2 sec then after the bios screen appears theres a sound coming from the HD like something is locking itself inside and then the black screen shows up in the screen. And thats it nothing happens from there on. i tried connecting another HD to the motherboard i power it on the bios screen appears and then it resets itself and happens again and again and again and again...
bah
bah
bah

[Tricky]

The only thing that baffles me is your inability to boot off the Windows disk. There are very few hardware problems that would cause such a thing. Namely the motherboard and/or processor. However, you can still access BIOS, or could at one point, which somewhat makes the mobo a moot solution. The more realistic reason is that the disk is bad. Is it a burnt copy? Sometimes there is a flaw and it won't copy the boot information correctly thus making it impossible to boot off that copy. You may also want to try resetting CMOS and double checking your aux. power connection if it seems to be resetting at random (sometimes the pins won't touch correctly which can cause a reboot cycle).

[Chantelle]

yeah if you disconnect your HDD all together does the windows disc boot?

BTW

Your gonna prob need your sata drivers on floppy disc if you intend to setup.


SEPERATE THOUGHT


Another thought is RAID... have you by any chance started making any changes to something that is described as RAID

[Hailstorm]

if i try to boot from a different windows xp cd will still boot? or do i need the cd i used to install windows in that machine? i remember my brother burning a cd with a program that puts SP2 into a normal windows cd so you dont have to install SP2 later. i think the program is called nlite.

also.. i can enter the bios menu and see everything like i normally would do, it does recognise the HD. i have to change the boot priorities to make it boot from the cd tho because when the hd is top priority it just stays there and doesnt try to boot from another device.

i also reset cmos yesterday disconnected and connected everything back together to check everything was fine but the problem persisted.

im gonna try disconnecting the HD and booting from the disc and locating the sata drivers. i havent changed anything remotely related to raid at all. =P


LAST MINUTE : i disconnected the HD completely and it does boot from the disc and this menu appears :
http://img479.imageshack.us/img479/4153 ... otait6.jpg

what should i do now if the HD is completely disconnected???

it's like it doesnt want to boot from the HD

[Tricky]

I dunno about you, but I don't have my HDD first. Even when I'm not booting a CD, it's usually Floppy, HDD, then CD. Then, if need be, I interchange the two. Leave the hard drive in and boot with CD first, HDD second, and Floppy third. See if that makes a difference. The only other reason I can think a hard drive would be causing the CD not to boot is if there is a hardware conflict between it and something else. Double-check the jumpers and maybe try a new SATA cable if you have a spare laying around.

[Hailstorm]

i will try connecting the HD again and see if it will boot from the cd, about the jumpers... the only jumpers i see are the ones in the HD and its about limiting the speed to 1.5gb/s not about slave or master or whatever.


edit: i connected the hd again and put the cd top priority to boot, HD second, floppy third. the 'press any key to boot from cd' appears then i press any key a message that says it's scanning hardware configuration appears for a second then disappears and nothing happens just a black empty screen.

[Chantelle]

Jumpres shouldnt be a problem on SATA I would have thought with thye CD drive.. Becasue SATA uses its own channel for each device..

SATA in theory shouldnt have master/slave..


Btw you might need the SATA drivers extracting to a floppy disk ... when windows starts it says press F6 to install additional SCSI / RAID drivers.. youmight need to do that..

However because of teh nature of teh HDD.. I would suggest testing either another one if poss ... or can you put it into another system just as a secondary disk just to see if it works or detects.. it could be screwed

[Melissa]

If its 12 months you should be covered on guarantee

if its a pre built, you shoudl have never gone inside it in the first place.. seal broken warranty void!!

your hdd soudning a bit sick at present

[Tricky]

There are jumpers on the SATA drive to adjust certain built-in settings. I know on quite a few, in order to operate SATA drives that operate in both I and II, you have to move the jumpers, as you do on mine.. Sometimes having some whacky setting will just cause the HDD to operate wrong in both ways. It's good just to make sure that it is set correctly.

But that doesn't really matter. I don't think it's the CD drive either, since he can boot the disk when the HDD isn't plugged in. It's possible it's a problem between the two, but I have no idea what would cause that. Worst case scenario, he could find someone with a SATA-capable system, put his HDD in and try formatting and installing the OS on theirs, then porting it over onto his computer to see if it'll boot. If it won't work on the other system, or if he brings it back and it won't work on his own, then we've got some more insight into the problem. Unfortunately, hardware is one of the most annoying problems to try to treat, and trial and error is the only way to figure out the issue.

i downloaded a program called cpu-z to check some specs and when i executed it windows froze and a weird beep-like sound came from the speakers but nothing from the pc itself,

I'm trying to figure out what might have caused that, and what it in turn did to the computer. It's remotely possible something shorted it when it was gathering temperatures, fan-speeds, voltages, etc... But that'd be kinda rare -- not that rare things don't happen to computers often. Let's hope it's just something simple like the HDD being damage, and not the entire motherboard.

[Chantelle]

Sorry i only thought that in the sense he was checking a slave master system like on E-IDE.

As we both said his best bet is to find either another system or another SATA drive.

if he wants to install on another system he must be careful that the general spec is similar as if the HAL is different it will screw up or not work properly.


What I dont get isif it worked fine before then had died and just wont work again. Assuming he has done everything right I am wondering hardware failure.

But the process of elimination is always your key, as I and Tricky have pointed out it looks like your HDD needs to be either identified as the problem or ruled out and you really need to test it

[Chantelle]

thinking about it more

IF the Motherboard or CPU was dead, I would be surprised that it would get to the stage ready to install windows (wit no HDD present)..

All evidence thus far points to a suspect drive...

Obviously check your media is in good nick