PC's Freezing

[jpatry]

Hello,

Can anyone tell me why a PC would continually freeze up? I have two in a lab of 16 PC's, all running Windows 95 on an NT network. I did scandisk and defrag and everything checked out OK. I also did a virus scan (have the latest dat file) and they're both clean. I cleaned out all unneeded programs and files. Both PC's will periodically have this error message: Disk boot error, insert system disk and hit enter. I sent both these in to a repair shop and they came back saying nothing was wrong with the hard drive. I tried reinstalling Windows 95 and all the software applications after running fdisk and formatting c. Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

Jen

[Remind]

The only suggestion I can give at this moment is check the fan on the processor. I experienced also problems with a system and the fan was broken so the processor was getting hot.

[diurnal]

About the boot disk error, i think the floppy is still in the drive , so take out the floppy and try to boot up.

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Sledgehammer will save the day!

[jpatry]

Thanks for the suggestions. There is no floppy in the drive, it's not the non-system disk error, it says hard disk failure so I'm assuming it's a hardware problem.

I'll check the fans as suggested and see if that works.

Thanks again,
Jen

[diurnal]

All I can tell you is if i had your cpu , it would be fixed.Trust me.Could be some connections are off.Like hard drive cable backwards. Its hard to tell if your not looking at it.I cant believe that you took it to the shop and its still not fixed. Crazy stuff.Youve ruled out viruses,software problems for sure.Could be your powersupply.Most of the time its your powersupply that causes freeze ups and reboots.Could be your ram, could be your processer.See where i m getting at.Hopefully the shop you took it too will fix it for free next time you send it in.

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Sledgehammer will save the day!

[Paleo Pete]

Hard disk failure means exactly that. Either the hard drive or the cable has a problem. Power supply and memory will not produce hard drive related errors, except in the rare case that the power cable to the hard drive fails. Usually the entire power supply will fail first.

First thing I would try is make sure the ribbon cable is securely connected, then try a different cable, if neither of those solves the problem the possibility that the hard drive is having problems is very good. Scandisk will not always find mechanical problems, such as the read/write head getting stuck.

Freezes can be caused by power supply, heat, bad memory, system resources getting tied up, programs attempting to run using memory already in use by other programs, corrupted system files, video drivers and more...it's often very difficult to troubleshoot. Check my site posted below, you should find some useful links to the MS Knowledge Database related to similar problems, and the search page as well. I believe mjc also has some excellent links to information regarding this type of problem. Check one of his posts, his site is in his signature too.

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[mjc]

Youuuuuu Raaannnnnng!

If you have the option in BIOS to set the drives to autodetect set them to it, some disk errors can be caused by the incorrect drive settings...

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mjc
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