Hi, I've built this new computer since about May of this year. Here is the complete specification: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ processor Abit NF7-S motherboard 256MB PC2700 DDR RAM 80GB ATA-133 7200rpm hard disk 128MB ATI Radeon 9200SE graphics card Onboard sound & LAN 32x16x32 CD-RW burner 16x48 DVD-ROM drive It went together fine and I changed the multiplier and bus settings in the BIOS to change the clock speed up to 2.2GHz (equivalent to the 3200+). I've read in many different places about this and decided to try it out. I then proceeded to install Windows XP and made a single NTFS partition (the default). It booted up fine, I installed the chipset, VGA, LAN and audio drivers. I then downloaded and installed all the critical updates etc. I shut it down feeling glad that it had worked flawlessly so far. On the next day, I booted it up and noticed that it detected the hard drive as random characters. I mean, like when you look at a web page in the ISO-8859-1 charset when it's supposed to be displayed in a Japanese one. Complete gobbledygook. So, I went into the BIOS and redetected the hard disk. By the way, it's made by Excelstor. It showed up fine after auto-detection and so I saved the settings and exited. Again, when I booted it up it came up as gobbledygook. When it does this, it refuses to boot up and just does nothing after the POST. I then got the drive RMA'd and it got replaced. When I got the replacement, it exhibited this exact same behaviour after a small while. So, it got RMA'd too. Finally, I got my second replacement back and I thought it was solved. My grandad (who was doing the dirty work of RMAing it) put it into his machine and made a single 80GB FAT32 partition and formatted it. He gave it back to me, I put it in my machine and it worked straight away. This afternoon, I started up my machine and all was fine. I was into Windows XP and browsing the WWW when the mouse froze and a blue screen came up. I hadn't configured it to not restart (in the System Properties) yet so I didn't catch the whole of the error message. It was something about a "PAGE FAULT". So, I decided to play it safe and booted up into Safe Mode. All was well until about 10-15 minutes later when the mouse froze up. Just after this, the screen went blank but my PC was still on. I thought the VGA cable might have been knocked about but it wasn't. So, I turned it off, waited 30 seconds and then turned it back on. Nope. Nothing. So, I troubleshooted and used the strip-down-to-the-bare-essentials method of finding the flaw. (You've guessed it...) The PC refuses to start up if my hard disk is plugged in. I've tried resetting my BIOS settings (multiple times), removing everything apart from the processor, HSF and memory and various other things. How do I get computer to accept my hard disk. You're probably going to say try the hard disk in another computer. So I will -- in a while: I'm too annoyed right now. Please help me, I really don't know what's going on! Thanks, James

Well, there may be a couple of things going on here, James. One, you may need to underclock it back to a standard setting for the time being. I wouldn't think that a good hard drive would be bothered much by that, then again... The second thing is, the hard drive, itself. I have never, personally, hard of this brand. I do know that the Western Digital and Maxtor drives currently being built are not nearly as good as they were, say, last year. It's not unusual to get a bad hard drive, these days. Bad, as in bad design. Everything I've read lately says go with Seagate. Personally, I use Maxtor and WD, but they are older models. See if you can borrow someone's hard drive that's working well. (!) Or try yours in someone else's system for awhile. I really feel that this is a hard drive problem. HTH :) Bob

Your IDE cable may be bad, try another one. And try to keep the cable as far away from power cables as you can. And try your best not to bend the IDE cable; this happened to me once with my CD drives cable when I closed the case it must of got bent somehow. So when I turned on my comp the CD drive that was supposed to say Light-on LTR52327S said L&ight-on @TR 5%2/S. So I opened the case and saw the bent cable and flattened it out, and it worked great. Symbios

Reset your CPU to the stock settings (11 x 166mhz). My guess is your PC2700 RAM is what's giving you grief. I don't know why you'd want a full single 80GB partition anyway, but it should be NTFS, not FAT32 http://www.thundercloud.net/information-avenue/ntfs-vs-fat32/ http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314463

Sorry, I didn't format with a single 80GB partition this time. I made a 5GB partition instead (I forgot) and formatted it using FAT32. "If you have a hard drive over 40 gig in size, be certain to choose the option NTFS" In the preceding paragraph it refers to partitions and this is what I presume they mean. My partition is less than 40GB and so this is not a valid point for me. "Clusters cannot be 64 kilobytes (KB) or larger. If clusters are 64 KB or larger, some programs (such as Setup programs) may incorrectly calculate disk space." If I remember correctly, my cluster size was 4KB (although I may be wrong). Also, it means files will take up less space, i.e. one tiny file will take up 4KB instead of a 64KB chunk. "It is recommended that you use NTFS with Windows XP because of its advanced performance, security, and reliability features." Performance is not noticeable for me. In fact, I had trouble with NTFS on my previous hard disk (a 20GB one) because it kept on drumming the hard disk. I checked everything else possible which could be causing this -- I even took the XP services down to the bare minimum of 4 services and terminated every other process apart from system ones. When I reformatted in FAT32, all was fine. In fact, it felt faster for me. Security: I don't need any specific access control list features or encryption whatsoever. My network is on NAT and so it's (almost) impossible for anyone on the LAN or Internet to access my computer without my permission. Reliability: There is probably some benchmark written by a geeky Microsoft techy which shows an improvement in uptime of NTFS over FAT32. But I don't pay attention to anything like that. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. My FAT32 partitions work fine and NTFS do too. The only noticeable difference is that you have to perform a disk scan if you incorrectly shut down a FAT32 system. However, I rarely do this and so I don't care much for it. "Some older programs that were not written for Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 may exhibit slow performance after you convert the FAT32 file system to NTFS. This behavior does not occur on a clean partition of NTFS." I don't use these 'older programs' and I have never converted a FAT32 into an NTFS partition. "If you run other Windows operating systems on your computer in addition to Windows XP..." I don't. Only some distro of GNU/Linux that I was testing out at the time (on a seperate partition). "Microsoft highly recommends you choose NTFS" Who cares: they have 1000s of security flaws, XP is highly unoptimized by default and yet they've been making software for a while now. "If your hard drive is larger then 32 GB, use NTFS for best performance." Well, well. My PC used to boot (before this palava) in under 7 seconds. On a FAT32 partition. As I mentioned, I've already tried resetting my BIOS which sets my clock and bus settings to what you said. I want to get a stick of 256/512MB PC3200 DDR RAM soon but it's too expensive at the moment. James