ThirtySixBelow
01-18-2006, 09:18 AM
My computer has been fine lately, but as of yesturday something weird started happening. I was playing need for speed most wanted, and I was driving around and all of a sudden I turned a corner and half the level was missing and all I could see was the skybox and the computer just froze with it looking like it was trying to load the level. Then after about 15 seconds I got the bsod saying beginning physical memory dump. I just hit the restart button. Opon restarting it was having trouble getting to grub. It would saying updating vmi or something, like it says before it loads grub, but then it would just hang. I would continually hit restart and it would hang at various points during bootup. Sometimes it would pretend like it was going to boot to windows once i made it to grub and then i would either just get text saying "booting windows xp" or something about a chainloader in text, and then just hang. Occationally if I restart my computer, the usb doesn't seem to work either and it can't find my keyboard. If i unplug the psu and then plug it back in this usually fixes it. I've been messing with computers for a while, but this puzzles me. I'm thinking maybe HDD because of the hangs on boot and the inability to load parts of my level in the game without locking my system. I have no idea what a CPU does when it's about ready to die, but I would think windows wouldn't work at all either. After about 30 tries of screwing with it, I can get into windows and it works fine, except, I tried to defrag my computer last night and that locked it up too. So my guess is HDD. Or maybe faulty ram. Does the defragger use ram? I would think so. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Also, the HDD is about 2-3 years old.
Also, the HDD is about 2-3 years old.