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Posted by: Brett W Oct 15 2003, 09:48 PM

I need some PC info. My Hell computer just took a dump. Cruising the internet this morning and seeing the blue screen of death tonight, now it won't talk to my hardrive, won't recognize the hard drive or the CD drive and only sees the floppy drive. I keep getting a ICE error? Anybody have any experience in this area? We can keep it of the forum if necessary. What brands of motherboard are decent, and what about hard drives. It had a Maxtor 40GB ATA7200 harddrive and what ever mother board dell put in it to handle a 1.7Gig Pentium four chip.

thanks for any help anyone can offer

Posted by: p914 Oct 15 2003, 11:12 PM

Yeah the blue screen is not a good sign. You running win 2000?

Posted by: Pnambic Oct 16 2003, 06:52 AM

I've owned two Maxtors. They both died very quickly. And I don't even do any heavy computing like professional graphics rendering or anything. Maybe thats why you always see Maxtor drives at BestBuy and the like with all those mail-in rebates. I will never buy another Maxtor.

I've had very good luck with Fujitsu HDD's I still have a 540 MB Fujitsu from '93 that runs just as strong as it ever did. And at first, that computer ran 24/7 for 2 years straight (averaging probably no more than one reboot a month). I've never had one fail so far....(knock on silicon).

My Western Digital experience has been so-so. Just recently, I've seen two WD's fail, but one of them was pretty old and had a shade-tree tech playing with it that may have damaged it while trying to upgrade his computer.

Specific wording of the error message would help.

If you appreciate timely shipping and excellent customer service, you can check out http://www.newegg.com, though they only carry SCSI Fujitsu HDD's. IBM has a pretty good reputation in the HDD market and I've seen a lot of positive reviews of Seagate HDD's recently, but have no personal experience with them. http://www.pricewatch.com may be a little cumbersome to get used to, but it will give you a fair look at whats available online to get a good idea of the going rate for a given product.

Posted by: kafermeister Oct 16 2003, 07:06 AM

Ditto. I will never buy another Maxtor. I've had much better experiences with Seagate and Western Digital. So far, they're my favorites.

I don't have any real good advice on mother boards as the hard-core gamers and the run-of-the-mill BBS surfer (like myself) will have different needs.

Personally, I've got a Shuttle AI-61 that I bought a few years ago from Tigerdirect.com. It was cheap and came with all of the drivers for Windows. I've only had one or two blue screens (win98) in the past few years. And the kids have lots of junk loaded on it. It just keeps cranking away.

Rick

Posted by: Brett W Oct 16 2003, 04:01 PM

I am running XP and I don't remmeber what the bkue screen said because it went away promptly. I now get several things from a black boot screen:

IDE config errors, can't find drive errors, can read disk? , etc. I am going to try some suggestions tonight and call Dell tomorrow and see what they will do.

Thanks for all of the suggestions.

Posted by: SirAndy Oct 16 2003, 04:17 PM

either your harddrive is dead or the IDE controller died.
try harddrive first (get a new one). the controller is onboard and can't be replaced.

i hope you had backup copies of your important stuff.
that's why all my puters have at least 2 HDs. the chances of both blowing smoke at the same time are slim.

Andy

Posted by: seanery Oct 16 2003, 04:19 PM

you can add an ide controller and disable the onboard one making the new controller the boot drive.

Posted by: SirAndy Oct 16 2003, 04:20 PM

never works right ...
btdt, less hassle to buy a new board.

Andy

Posted by: Pnambic Oct 16 2003, 04:31 PM

Depending on how old it is, Dell may send replacement parts. I've heard stories that they do that.

Is it still under warranty?