Drive letters went whaco

[gsxr750]

My XP machine went nuts over the last couple of days. It started rebooting itself, and eventually, I started getting bad boot.ini messages. I have been able to get into safe mode after repeated trys, but when I go into explorer to check out the hard drive, all of my drive letters are messed up. The c: drive shows up as "#", and the other drives show up with things like "%" or "$". Once I'm in safe mode, it's really touchy, and reboots itself if you breath on it too hard.....

Also, when I boot with a floppy, I can't change to the c:\ drive - it says the c:\ drive does not exist.

I've already tried doing boot scan to search for viruses - no help.

Does anybody know what I've got going here?

 

[GavinO]

It sounds like something, somewhere has been corrupted. What sorts of things instigate a restart? Any particular system event, or more of after a certain period of time? The sinister possibility is that you've got some sort of virus messing with you; the less sinister would be that you've got some ventilation issues with the machine, and are cooking your drives and processor to the point that you're losing stability.

 

[gsxr750]

This started happening when one of my kids was using AOL chat. He's on the computer most of the time. It got worse and worse - for day or so we could get in using safe mode. Then we couldn't - we would get this line of data repeated:

"multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\windows\system32\" - with various file names. Every so often it would go all the way into safe mode, but it would usually blue screen and crash in pretty short order.

This computer is a compaq that I've had for several years. The hard drive went south on it, so I had one of my other son's friends work on it. During the course of his activities, it ended up with both a new motherboard and a new case as well - and the case was missing one side panel which I was supposed to get but never did. I had it shoved up against the wall so it was pretty much closed - and it's not really dirty in there. But maybe that ruined the cooling. I used it this way for close to a year. I was actually pleased when I got the thing back - it was faster (think it had better hardware all around), but when I tried to use the Restore disks on it, I got a message saying that the computer was not the right model.

I think I'm just going to go buy a new computer rather than try to fix this thing...was hoping that with the odd symptoms maybe it would have been an easy diagnosis that I could act on.

Thanks for you reply.

 

[phreakwars]

I'm kinda wondering myself if it might just be your CPU fan needs changed and its overheating causing crashes. Or maybe there are wires stuffed up by it causing it to slow or prevent cooling. (Amateur working on it, I would bet).

With todays CPU's, cooling is a MUST !!! Not like a few years ago where a simple heatsink would be sufficient. One of the signs that its not getting enough cooling is the symptoms you describe. 99% of the time people who think they have a virus, usually don't.

I'd suggest going to Wal-Mart™ or whatever, and getting a can of compressed air and blowing out all the dust. Use LIGHT BURSTS, as holding a direct stream of compressed air CAN create moisture, and you REALLY don't wanna put moisture on the mainboard. If anything, and your in the mood for some serious cleaning and don't wanna buy a new fan until you know for sure its the problem, take the old one out, get yourself some rubbing alcohol and Q-tips, and scrub it down good, THEN on the back of it, if you peel the protective sticker off, there is usually a little rubber stopper, carefully take the stopper off (an exacto knife works best) and put in a drop or 2 of turbine oil, and manually spin the fan to get it worked into the cracks, replace the cap, give it a wipe with some alcohol to remove any excess oil, and a few more manual spins for good measure, and put it back on the heat sink.

In YOUR CASE however, since its a Compaq, it might have the CPU fan built into the power supply. If thats the case, then just blow it out with the air, and nothing more. Don't risk tearing your power supply apart if your not very experienced with them.

If it is still fairly clean and your getting reboot probs still, then you might possibly be overloading it if you had added another hard drive or CD-Rom drive. Compaq power supplys are very weak.

As for the: "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\windows\system 32\" thats just your computer trying to boot into safe mode. When it attempts a normal boot it puts more pressure on the OS since you are loading all kinds of stuff to make windows run. And when it initiates a driver, the OS buckles and crashes. So when it reboots it trys to goto safe mode instead to correct the problem, and thats why you are seeing the: "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\windows\system 32\" commands.

As for the boot.ini, most of them should look like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP "
/noexecute=optin /fastdetect
.
.