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problems with my PII 250

C

codename47

Gawd
Joined
Mar 7, 2003
Messages
990
I've got a PII 250 running my house file server and all of a sudden it won't make it into windows without rebooting and going right back to the boot screen memory check.... I haven't honestly messed with it yet but I wanted to know some angle of attack... it is in my basement which is like 60 degrees and its setting on cold concrete... I don't know how hot the old PII gets but maybe that could be it.... it ran for like a solid month with no problems what so ever and I went away on vacation so I shut it off and now it doesn't work???

The reboot time changes... sometimes it gets to the point where windows starts but it goes strait to the chkdsk and beings to run and then reboots or it gets to the end of the channel check, or somewhere in between those two... and then eventually after it reboots several times it just stops giving video signal and becomes nonresponsive...
any ideas?
 
Okay, not to be a meanie but..

1) A PII 250 does not exist, PIIs come in 233, 266, 300, 333, 350, 400 and 450 speeds. (oh gawd I'm a geek for knowing that)

2) bad memory most likely, run memtest86 for a hour or two on it.
 
Bad memory, or someone put a trojen or back door on your file server.
 
Make sure the heatsink on the CPU is not clogged with dust and if it has a fan, make sure it's working. This sounds a lot like a heat issue.

Also make sure something didn't crawl up in the case and die or build a nest. You would be surprised at how easy it can be for some little creature to crawl into a case and do whatever.

Also, I would get memtest86, put it on a floppy, and run that to see if your memory is bad.

You could also put a different PSU in the system to see if that does any good.
 
Guys - it says PII 266 in his sig.

While running Memtest is never a bad idea, I'd look at the hard drive. I see from your sig the raid 5 - but are you booting from that as well? If I had to guess, that's just for storage and you are booting from an older IDE device that gave up the ghost. Try booting from a diskette and seeing if you can run scandisk from dos or something.
 
Hey thanks for the help... I'll make sure and never mistake a PII processor speed again :)

Does memtest run in windows or use some other method b/c I can't even get it to boot without restarting so I don't know how I will run the test when I can't get it to start at all sometimes....

Partytogo you are right about the old dusty fireball 3 gig hard drive I have as my boot. The RAID 5 set is just for storage...

I'll give the ideas you guys have a whirl and let you know how it turns out... thanks for the help... I appreciate it greatly
 
Memtest86 runs "stand alone'; the install program creates a bootable floppy so it's "OS agnostic". It's great diagnostic software.

....even runs on P2 250's....:D

Good Luck - B.B.S.
 
Just a thought about you saying it's in a cold basement sitting on cold concrete....but what about moisture getting in it.
 
Hey thanks again for the replies.... I tested the memory and it was good, even pulled individual sticks out (4X64MB) to check. Then I went with the harddrive idea... switched out the old quantum fireball 3gig and put in a 160gig I bought recently.... I put windows xp pro on it and it worked great so then I was thinking the old drive went bad on me so all was fixed... wrong... I loaded the scsi RAID set and checked for any lost or corrupted data.... I found a folder named something crazy like abcg23aldk23ksdl3 and it had all kinds of dll files in it that made no sense and it wasn't in there before..... then went to another work station to check the network connection.... when I tried to use the usual double click on icon it gave me an explorer error and reboot of explorer... so then I right clicked and went to explore and it allowed me to enter... it then locked my computer for several seconds and the PII 266 all of a sudden started to reboot... ???? I'm lost ... thinking about giving the PII to someone else and buying a 50$ elcheapo and trying to use it... it has to be some type of hardware problem when using the raid set but it worked for so long.... and just now developed a problem. Anyways...let me know if you guys have any other ideas.....

Moisture would be a good idea but I have a dehumidifier down there and its pretty dry.... the heatsink and fan are all working fine... its well seated... ?? I thought maybe a virus or something but from what I don't know...

Any more ideas???? Is it worth it to put much more time into a PII 266????
 
And thank you for coming back to the thread with an update.

I still point at the old 3 gigger being the root of the problem. If it flaked out, it might have taken drivers for the raid system with it which could cause the corrupt data you're seeing, among other things.

An upgrade though wouldn't hurt. That 266 has got to have problems handeling the thoughtput a SCSI RAID5 can create.
 
Well I decided to say screw the PII 266 and get something else.... although it isn't much better.... I'm getting laid off in a month so I'm being a little conservative... I paid 35$ for a PII 350, its got 64mb of ram but I'll just still some off the other and bring it up to 192... (I work in 64MB intervals :) it didn't have a cd drive but I have a couple of those...it came with a 6gig hard drive and the usual crappy stuff... got it at EPC (off of lease store) here in Saint Louis... they've got a lot of horribly slow computers which works fine for me b/c all I'm using it for is to control a file server... probably still bottlenecks the system but I'm not big time or anything...

I think I'll load everything up and then get norton loaded just in case the RAID has something funky on it... I'll probably go through and check it for disk errors as well before I even try opening the folders up. I hope this works and I don't have to dump everything on my RAID set.....
 
That screwy folder with all the DLLs in it sounds like there is or was a virus on the system. A lot of viruses like to put screwy named folders all over the place. Many times you can't delete them from inside Windows even after the virus is removed. You'd have to go to DOS to delete the folder.

The other possibility sounds like data corruption. Bad hardware could have caused it, a bad shut down, or a virus.

Definintely run a virus scan to see if anything comes up.
 
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