Think my 1655 dropped a deuce on my 'puter

rexdaisy 2009-03-17 16:50:59 UTC #1

Through many BSOD's, either random crashes or not even booting to be able to reach the screen to start in safe mode, I have come to the sad conclusion that my beloved drive is DEAD.:sad::sad: Narrowed the hardware failure to the drive cause after running prime95 overnight with no problems and then TRYING to run Memtest86 and the drive would not open with the button(not even a green light) and when using the properties at My Computer you could hear a motor straining and the computer would lock up.

I installed an OLD Gateway drive (REALLY OLD, from a P166 system), I ran Memtest overnight on one ram chip, and all day while at work on the other ram chip and they passed. Without the 1655, have had no problems.

WHY would a bad DVD drive cause system crashes????

On start up, the drive's green LED would flash, 3 times I think.

Is there any chance to save it.

It is a crossflashed I/O magic, with BCDB firmware and MS driver.

Rest of my system:
Windows XP Pro SP3
Asus A8N5X
AMD 939 3200+
1G Kingston HyperX (2x512)
Seagate 250G SATA (at 1.5) OS drive (finally had to replace the 6G Fujitsu)
Seagate 200G PATA data drive
Winfast PX6200TD graphics

rexdaisy 2009-05-17 19:22:37 UTC #2

After much more frustration…(and a few holes in the walls) (okay…just a lot up VERY necessary swear words) turns out 99% of the problem was a crashing hard drive. Don’t really know why disconnecting the 1655 helped (ended up just slowing) the problem. The 1% was that the drive belt did break. Kinda like having a flat tire after the engine blows up. Sent the 6-month old drive back to Seagate and super-glued the belt back together. Super-glued an old car tapedeck belt years ago, an it was still working 5 years later when the car was traded.

Used “TestDisk” to temporarily recover the bad drive, rewrite the partition and masterbootrecord. Drive lasted long enough to back it up. Seagate Tools for DOS was unable to help at all. The Long Test would just lock up, and the “zero fill” erase could not run at all.

The 1655 is back to its normal self:bow:

Now if we could just come up with a good reason for the tray not ejecting while “cold”…