Peter, I just have to say this was a great trip down memory lane when people had real control of their computers. Good job, Betsy At 02:07 AM 9/1/2009, you wrote: > > >i have an old windows 98 computer in my music studio, which has all i need >for controling my multi track recording decks and for doing final mixing >down and creating cd's and mp3s. >it was taking about half an hour for the computer to load windows. and >another 10 minutes for the start menu to come up. >sound forge would load slowly but i could not open any files. > >all my data files are on a 'd' drive, so i was not worried about loosing >all my work but to re-configure another computer to do what this one does >would take much money and weeks of work. > >no virus, this machine is not on the internet and i never take any media >from anyone. >i never do upgrades and did not add any new software or drivers. >maybe a hardware problem. > >i removed all running programs from the task manager except explorer, >window-eyes and systray, these are escential to keep running. >and made sure to get any extra programs out of the system start up. >this feature is buryed under the system configuration. > >i also did a registery check. >same trouble. > >i pulled out every card except the video and sound cards. >same. > >i swapped out the memory for some different ones. >no good. >i re-seated the cpu and all the cables. > >i was now pretty sure my hard drive was failing. > >i got an external speech synthesizer, old boot floppy disk with >format.com, fdisk, scandisk, xcopy and dos speech software on it and >started the machine and ran my dos speech software. >then did the below scandisk > >scandisk /surface /autofix /nosave > >scandisk started copying over the bad sectors right away. it ran for 24 >hours and was only 15 percent done. >i decided to stop it. > >i got another hard drive from a known good computer and connected it to >the wires from my second cd drive, and copyed it's contents to my 'd' >data drive. >then i reformated it to be a bootable drive > >format e:/s > >i then wanted to use xcopy to take an exact copy of my failing drive, but >i could not do that in native dos because it would not preserve the long >file names, so i had to hope the failing drive had one more start up in it >i removed the floppy and powered up. again it took about half an hour to >fully load and i went to dos mode under windows and typed in > >xcopy c:*.* e: /h /i /c /k /e /r /y /s > >copying started at a pretty good pace, but after about 9 hours copy >failures started to come on each file and then the whir of the drive >stopped completely. about 75 percent of the drive copied over, but it >seemed that all the windows system and program files made it over. > >i changed the jumper on the new drive from slave to master and connected >it to the wires from the failed one. >i pushed the floppy back in and powered up. > >i thought it would not make it past the cmos and i would have to get >someone to read the screen and reset them, but it was recognized as my >primary master. lucky break. > >i ran fdisk from the floppy and set the active partition on the new drive. >exited fdisk, took out the floppy and re-booted. > >i was amazed when the drive read right away and started windows and is >just fine. > >the computer now is exactly the same as it was, except it is much much >faster. i guess the old drive had been slowly failing for many weeks. > >older computers are much more accesssible, just like older cars can be >fixed. > >
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