Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Computer HELP

I might talk to some computer shops tomorrow and see if they can do anything to diagnose/fix my HD,, if not Circuit City has a 120mb one for $70 and my brother's baby's momma works there, so maybe get more of a discount. HP sucks.

Ok, well after reading all the problems that you've had and all the things you've tried to fix it, I would go along with everyone else on here and say, yes its the hard drive. I have to deal with this problem day after day with crappy HP's. Unfortunately like everyone said, newer HP's do not include any recovery disks. It is all on the hard drive.


If you change the hard drive, then you will need to get your hands on a Windows XP Home CD. As long as the computer has the COA (Certificate of Authenticity) sticker on it, then you are an owner of Windows XP Home and can use another persons CD to install it. But realize that, if you are not familar with installing Windows than you may have trouble. Not only will you have to manually install it instead of using recovery, but you will need to find drivers for all hardware that XP does not include drivers for, additional software such as CDRW software, DVD software, etc.


Not sure if I read it properly but I think it was mentioned earlier about taking the hard drive from the other computer and booting from it to see how it runs or vice-versa. Know that its not as simple as that. Niether computer will boot if you try to boot from the other computers hard drive. Anything Windows 2000 and higher requires that the hard drive be reloaded before being able to boot to it. A Windows 98 hard drive can be run on another computer with some work. It will take alot of software configuration but is possible (not worth it at all just for you to try and test it).

And oh yeah, I did see someone mention about taking your HP's hard drive and hooking it up into the older computer to test it out and see if the other computer has trouble reading it. This will not be possible because Windows 98 does not recognize Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is what your HP's hard drive is running on.


Oh, by the way, do not buy a Dell!!! Not worth the money at all. Lately i've been fixing more and more newer Dell's and usually turn out to be a bad hard drive. Dell likes to use crappy Maxtor brand hard drives in alot of there systems which is also what some HP's use. They have a tendency to last half as long as other well known brands such as Western Digital, Seagate, etc.


When you do decide to get a new hard drive, do not just chose any brand that has the best price. Look for Western Digital and Seagate first. I like to think that those are the best brands out there. (which is why my computer has both brands inside it right now )


Good luck with everything, and if you have any questions, let me know. I'm very familar with HP.

Thanks for the advice, though the hard drive I just pulled from the computer is a western digital, so I'm just gonna go with the best deal I can get. I'm guessing most of these companies probably pull from a common parts bin and they only thing different is the assembly. Which even with the best company, if somebody on the assembly line doesn't check something good, you can get a shotty HD. So I'm looking at a no name 120gb HD at circuit city for $70. It'll atleast last a year (warranty).

Western Digital do fail also, but no matter what brand you buy, your gonna find a bad drive from time to time. I would highly recommend a Western Digital with 8MB cache. Western Digital changed all drives from a 3 year warranty to a 1 year warranty except for the 8MB cache drives. They still include 3 year warranties. This is going to be the best option for you to go with since the 8MB cache drives on average only cost about 10-15 bucks more than the standard drives. So for 10-15 bucks more you get a much faster drive (noticeable difference) and 2 additional years of warranty. But thats just me. If you trust the brand that Circuit City has than go for it.

I don't trust anything. I trust the western digital would fail as soon as that 3 years is done, and I have no idea what to expect from the CC one. I should get whatever brand is in my old pionex, as it's still working. It's like that saying "the truth is out there",,, wait that's not rite,, "trust no one" maybe that's it. It's late. Thanks everyone for all the help, I guess I'm sorta on my own right now to get it running again, but if it wasn't for ya'll I'd still be trying to troubleshoot it. Thanks.

Is your system posting all the RAM?

Best Buy as an after X-mas sale on a 120gb drive for $32+ish after rebates. I think it was a Maxtor, if cost is not a big issue go with a Seagate

Good Luck Kremit. Hope you get it up and running again.

Kremit, how reliant are you on the Windows operating system?
Do you play lots of games or just a few specific ones... do you need MS Office (powerpoint etc.) for school? Do you need to run Photoshop? Or do you mostly use the computer for downloading, web browsing, music collecting etc. ?
If you have a friend who knows about Linux and can help you set it up and get the Nvidia driver installed (and JAVA and DVD playing etc), you might be happier using it than WindowsXP.
Again, this depends on what you need to do with your computer and which apps you need to run...
If you are even curious about something other than Windows (and the many, many problems that go along with it) download the Knoppix 3.3 Linux CD... http://www.knoppix.org/ download the iso file and burn it to CD (write image).
It boots from the CD and runs in memory.... doesn't touch the hard drive. You can use this both to test the Linux OS as well as test the functionality of your computer's hardware... if it runs poorly, you have a problem with your motherboard, not hard drive.
Whether or not you replace the hard drive... if you like Knoppix you will probably want to download Mandrake Linux 9.2 (3 CDs) available at http://www.mandrakelinux.com
... it is the best distro for new Linux users as well as being the most well-rounded for typical users. You would be amazed at what you can accomplish with those 3 CDs.