HD Dying or what?

[Atlas77]

Hi, I have had my Dell Dimension 3000 for about three years now. Great little home computer, ive never upgraded it in any sort of way, overclocked or or anything. About a couple days ago ive been getting this black screen with with a little white box in the top left hand corner before it goes to the Windows xp Start up screen, and it seems that every time i boot up i set there for longer and longer waiting it to come the the login screen. Is this a sign of HD failing or what.

 

[leSLIe]

it looks like u need to reinstall windoze and get updated driverz

 

[CorpX]

sounds like a software problem to me also.

boot up into safe mode and hang out for a while and see if its still happening.

 

[BillParrish]

usually right before windows shows the splash screen it activates the video driver and changes the screen resolution. I think that is what you are seeing as the computer is then waiting on something else to happen and a slow HDD would explain whatever loading next taking more time than normal to "get going".

Starting up in safe mode and watching the names of the drivers as they load could be helpful. Defrag the hard drive could help too.

If you can find out what kind of drive (and the model number) is in there you can probably download a utility from the manufacture (WD or Seagate) that will run diagnostics on the drive. Might want to pop onto the dell support forums and see what people say.there.

I would burn anything critical to a CD asap, good news is you can probably replace that drive with one twice as large and faster for $70 unless you got something really fancy.

 

[Johnx64]

In device manager under ide\atapi controllers\Primary ide channel\right click properties\advanced settings and see if its in pio instead of dma if so just uninstall it and reboot if thats the problem it should be fixed once you reboot.