Question: which component is bad?

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Xixor

n00b
Joined
Apr 15, 2003
Messages
3
Got a question for you guys. I've got an admittedly rather old system that's been giving me a lot of trouble over the last several days. During startup, the system will post, go through component detection, and get through the screen with Windows XP and the blue progress bar. After that, screen goes black and the primary monitor goes to standby as if it's not receiving a video signal. After 10-20 sec, the secondary monitor does the same thing, and the computer restarts it self. It seems like it will go through this cycle indefinately. Strange thing is, it will boot to safe mode without a problem.

I've tried repairing windows install, and yesterday I formated the C drive and reinstalled a fresh XP copy. It worked without a problem until about 5 hours later when the computer hard-froze during WoW, and now is doing the same thing again.
Hardware is this:
ABit NF7 v2
Athlon 1.4GHz
GeForce 6600GT AGP
420W PS (relatively new, since old one crapped out a few months ago)
Corsair 512mb ram
NEC DVD-RW
Maxtor 40gb ATA and WD 60gb ATA drives (both like 4-5 yrs old)

Any ideas what could be causing this? Right now I'm thinking maybe the hard drive, since it's so old, but the proc and the ram are both at least 4 yrs old also. Appreciate any help.
 
sounds like a driver issue, but that wouldn't make any sense after a fresh install. I wanna say video card but if it played wow alright for a bit then that's not it. maybe it's one of the hard drives.

 
I'm hoping its not the vid card, because it's only a few months old. The HD I could understand, since they're both pretty old, but I couldn't explain why a fresh install was working for 6 hours. Thx for the reply.
 
I would say hard drive. If thats what caused WoW to fail and then do the same thing, it sounds like it is the problem. If it is faulty, its possible that it corrupted the Windows build in a way so that it would make Windows have trouble starting up. A new build would fix it, but only to the point where it became corrupt again due to the HDD failing, which you described. If you can try a new HDD (or a different one) and see what happens.
 
Sounds like what my computer was doing, similiar story too...

WoW included!

Resetting the BIOS fixed it though.

Don't ask why... but jumpering BIOS from the board fixed me up.
 
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