![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
Can anyone recomend a free or decently priced hardware diagnostic tool?
Little bit of reading as to what led to my asking...
The build in my sig had a problem a few days ago and once I got that solved the whole system is acting up and very weird.
Problem that happend was the stock cooling fan on the CPU broke, one of the blades snapped off and wedged itself into the heatsink. Made a bad noise and scared the crap out of me. Got the blade out and booted back up to finish my homework. I monitord the temps and everything seemed okay. I placed an order for a new cooler and avoided heavy loads to keep vibration and heat to a minimum.
One night after submitting some homework the system locked up completely. Forced a reboot and when it came to the XP pro loading screen the blue progress bar just kept' going for 10 minutes with no HDD activity or anything.
Rebooted to XP cd and recovery console to look at rebuilding the boot sector. Recovory console couldnt find windows installed, I restarted the CD and went to the install section to see what it listed my drives at. My window's drive label was gone, and my secondary hard drive showed up as one 131gig drive, in place of my many partitions and NTFS settings the 131 partition was there set to the fat file system.
I pull the drives and back up what I can from my main one and upon looking at my second drive all the partitions are gone and nothing is on it, (that one is pending data recovery.) Meanwhile my main drive goes back into the system and once the new cooler arrives and delete all the partitions and start over with it.
Window's goes on fine and once booted I try to put on service pack 2. Every time it would get to indexing files it would lock up the system. Reformatted again and got it to take all the way. Now that its back up I ran memtest for 18 hours or so, computer ran just fine all night, temps stayed okay and no problems. I go to exit mem test and the system locks up. Currently I am still on that instillation of windows trying to figure out wtf happend and what is continuing to happen.
I put CSS on as its quick and easy, reset it how it was prior to problems and loaded a server to see if the temps would spike or something to see if it was the new CPU cooler not set right (came with thermal grease on it etc) but the game in unplayable, 20 - 30 FPS with 30 - 80 choke. Not one thing hardware wise changed except the cooler and from what I could see TEMP wise everything is okay. I am baffled as to why thats a problem, which again could be the CPU heatsync not being set right, but I would have though the temps would show some hike under load.
I plan to pull it off and regrease / reset it tomorrow but if anyone has any ideas as to what might have caused the partitions and such to just just dissapear I would greatly appreciate it. I had 300 gigs of stuff I need to recover once I get the system back and stable.
I had thought about hard drive failure, but I only heard clanking sounds from it when the bad, first lock up happend, never before and never since so I dont think the hard drive's have gone bad. Mem test ran fine for so long that I dont think the CPU or the memory is bad. The MB could have gone out but I dont know what to think. The system was built 5 months ago and has ben rock solid until this and when something goes wrong for me it does it big.
Thanks for reading and helping if you can, this one has my mind numb and I am not an expert as it is. Just average.
Little bit of reading as to what led to my asking...
The build in my sig had a problem a few days ago and once I got that solved the whole system is acting up and very weird.
Problem that happend was the stock cooling fan on the CPU broke, one of the blades snapped off and wedged itself into the heatsink. Made a bad noise and scared the crap out of me. Got the blade out and booted back up to finish my homework. I monitord the temps and everything seemed okay. I placed an order for a new cooler and avoided heavy loads to keep vibration and heat to a minimum.
One night after submitting some homework the system locked up completely. Forced a reboot and when it came to the XP pro loading screen the blue progress bar just kept' going for 10 minutes with no HDD activity or anything.
Rebooted to XP cd and recovery console to look at rebuilding the boot sector. Recovory console couldnt find windows installed, I restarted the CD and went to the install section to see what it listed my drives at. My window's drive label was gone, and my secondary hard drive showed up as one 131gig drive, in place of my many partitions and NTFS settings the 131 partition was there set to the fat file system.
I pull the drives and back up what I can from my main one and upon looking at my second drive all the partitions are gone and nothing is on it, (that one is pending data recovery.) Meanwhile my main drive goes back into the system and once the new cooler arrives and delete all the partitions and start over with it.
Window's goes on fine and once booted I try to put on service pack 2. Every time it would get to indexing files it would lock up the system. Reformatted again and got it to take all the way. Now that its back up I ran memtest for 18 hours or so, computer ran just fine all night, temps stayed okay and no problems. I go to exit mem test and the system locks up. Currently I am still on that instillation of windows trying to figure out wtf happend and what is continuing to happen.
I put CSS on as its quick and easy, reset it how it was prior to problems and loaded a server to see if the temps would spike or something to see if it was the new CPU cooler not set right (came with thermal grease on it etc) but the game in unplayable, 20 - 30 FPS with 30 - 80 choke. Not one thing hardware wise changed except the cooler and from what I could see TEMP wise everything is okay. I am baffled as to why thats a problem, which again could be the CPU heatsync not being set right, but I would have though the temps would show some hike under load.
I plan to pull it off and regrease / reset it tomorrow but if anyone has any ideas as to what might have caused the partitions and such to just just dissapear I would greatly appreciate it. I had 300 gigs of stuff I need to recover once I get the system back and stable.
I had thought about hard drive failure, but I only heard clanking sounds from it when the bad, first lock up happend, never before and never since so I dont think the hard drive's have gone bad. Mem test ran fine for so long that I dont think the CPU or the memory is bad. The MB could have gone out but I dont know what to think. The system was built 5 months ago and has ben rock solid until this and when something goes wrong for me it does it big.
Thanks for reading and helping if you can, this one has my mind numb and I am not an expert as it is. Just average.
