So well, strange things going on. Yesterday I'm using away my pc, lalala. I do a steam update for CS, and suddenly CS starts acting very weird: I can connect to servers but after a minute or so I either

-crash to desktop with all sorts of technical info mumbo-jumbo
-disconnect from server without a warning into the server-search screen

That's not the real problem, I can live with that, hehe. Now, a bit later my mouse cursor 'disappears'. This isn't unusual, I've been having problems with it in the past as you know, cleaning mousemat/re-plugging it handles that.

So I reboot because of the mouse, and when windows starts loading up, bang, boots again. Try last known working config, bang, boots again.

I try safe mode, and that does work without a problem. Try to boot/last working config a few times over, no go. Since it's already 3.30AM I figured I'd go to bed and deal with it today.

I get up, start pc...goes automatically to the "safe mode, start windows normally" blabla screen from yesterday. Me picks safe mode in order to put some important docs on USB stick. Works, so I reboot again to see if I can work my windows CD magic or need a hardware check.

And what do you know: windows boots normally.



So...my options:

->not HD, no clunking and safe mode worked fine
->not power supply, since the pc would start just fine.
->got the BIOS beeb and everything
->windows itself...well, yes and no. The fact that it rebooted during windows load says yes, but the fact that I can start windows normally today says no.

Which leaves us:

->one of the bars of ram.
->graphics card

I would say most likely graphics card overheating or summit, no?


Anyway, any thoughts are welcome. It's weird shit.

I love Steam.

Well, I'm double about it. But I'll make another topic for that.


Further on my issues: I want to try and update my gfx and mobo drivers but I don't dare to reboot now I'm up and running.

you probably have a piece of failing hardware. Sorry, I couldn't be assed to read your whole post since it's late and I'm exhausted.

Anyway...basically, something got hot and started tweaking. It cooled down overnight, so when you booted again it was working again. Eventually it will fail. Precisely what it is? Beats me...virtually impossible to nail down since it's intermittent. Just expect your machine to die on you sometime in the next 1 day - 6 months, and then you can figure out what's broken.

Lol, Satis, you brighten everyones day!

Hehehe, yes, a real joyous news bringer! But thanx, suspected as much. We'll see. In the meantime I deleted all cookies, temp internet files, did a virus scan, spyware scan, trojan scan, close inspection of runing processes, used hijack this, and defragged both my HD's.

Things have been going fine ever since, except for a constant annoying lag in CS:S but that probably has to do with steam.

/me bows to Satis, the pc prophet


Because today I fire up my pc, and when I want to go to my secondary HD (40 gig one) it hangs a bit and then gives a "disk in drive X is not formatted...do you want to format now?" Y/N thingie. I rebooted once and same stuff. Also, reboot went slightly slower (and less noisier) prolyl because it was scanning for the failing HD, correct me if i'm wrong.

Now, there isn't really anything important on there afaik. But still, how does this recovery stuff work? Expensive I presume?

And another thing: would it be best if I "removed" the drive from windows for the time being, or doesn't it really matter if I have a failing HD hanging along? because I can't be bothered messing up my pc in paper-thesis time.

I'll clarify a bit: for now, would it be enough if I removed the drive in windows, or would it be best to physically detach it?

If you can, pull the hard drive out of the case. IF you can't/won't do that, don't worry about it. I had a HD crap out on me recently too...data recovery software isn't expensive, but getting a service to do it for you is expensive, yes. I lost my mp3 collection. Luckily I had all but 5-10GB of it backed up on CDs, but it still blows. 250GB drive dead. I hate Western Digital now. And I'm also going to build a RAID array when I can afford it so a single drive crapping out on my doesn't fuck me like this again.

Cool, ok. So nothing big to worry about then for now, tnx for the info.

Also, wtf is a RAID array?


Only thing I lost was porn, but I got most of it on DVD and cd so whatever. If I were to choose anything to be deleted it'd be the porn anyway...it's the easiest to come by.

It was a Maxtor btw

Oh the irony.



well RAID i think is usually used for making a virtual image of your harddrive, so all the data is doubled in case something happens. I seriously doubt you have this utility since it is used mainly on servers. I think you have the readiness for RAID utility. I could be wrong, computer god satis will clarify this matter

you can do software raid, but hardware raid is more robust and more available. Alot of motherboards come with RAID controllers built in. Personally, I'm going to buy a RAID controller and a couple hard drives when I have the cash and built my RAID that way.

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Individual Disks. The I has some dispute as to what it means, but anyway, that's the idea. Basically, you can run multiple drives that work in tandem for something or other.

RAID 0 - 2+ drives that take advantage of some of hte properties of hard drives to make data reading much faster. Basically, when a drive first spins up, its data rate is very fast...once it's going, it slows down. This alternates data back and forth between 2+ drives (called striping) so this faster access rate can be maintained. No redundancy, but you do get speed.

RAID 1 - 2+ drives. The drives mirror one another exactly. If 1 drive craps out, the rest of the drives in the array have exact copies of the first drive.

RAID 0 + 1 - Combines striping and mirroring. Better performance than RAID 1 while still maintaining data redundancy.

There are other RAID levels. If I can afford it, I'm gonna go RAID 5. We'll see. This is a ways down the road. I don't have the money/time to deal with it now.

Allright, thanks for the info. Not that I understood everything, but enough.


HD issue: used a recovery software to save some mildly important files and the best porn on there, worked like a charm. Then I tried to use the windows disk checker and defragmenter on the drive, both failed. Proceeded to format, but 3 "squares" before completion it wouldn't continue...so it's physically fucked, not "just" the file structure. Not a disaster, but 40 gig of storage space gone.

Take it the hard drive is past it's guaruntee?