I had WMP scanning my e: drive (second physical drive--d: and e:) for media when I heard a number of odd clicking noises from the drive I hadn't heard before. Seemed to be much different from normal accessing sounds. And the system froze. I restarted. I have an HP and had not disabled the logo during start-up, and sat there as the system seemed to do nothing. I did not hear the *beep* sound. Angry and confused, I shut off the computer and vowed to deal with it later. Later, I turned it on and after fifteen seconds without the beeping sound I was holding the power button to manually shutdown when it beeped and started up. In Windows, everything seemed normal and I began to search for solutions (but did not come across this forum ;() I backed up some of my personal data and foolishly went away from the computer to socialize. Upon return I saw the blue screen of death--except it had a message I had never seen before "Cannot write to C:\" I clicked okay and tried to see what was going on (the system was running slower than I'd ever seen before) but I had to run and take care of an errand. When I returned the computer was OFF (I'm sure no one physically turned it off). I then found myself in my present position where I am unable to boot up (luckily I have this other, older computer--but I NEED the other computer & my data). I received this error during start-up after this self-power-off: "System Configuration Data Updated ERROR 0270: Real Time Clock Error ERROR 0251: System CMOS Checksum bad - Default Configuration Used" I went into the CMOS noticed the system clock said 1/1/1988 (I decided not to change it for the time being) and changed the setting for the HP logo flashing during boot and rebooted. I then received the checksum error again and changed that value, then restarted again. No errors, but then a long delay, probably in the area of a minute between the mouse being initialized and the computer recognizing my first physical drive, and another minute before it read my second physical drive. Then it quickly recognized my two CD drives and *beeped*. It then seemed to idle at a blank screen (except for the slowly blinking cursor in the upper-left hand corner) for a few minutes, before moving on to the Windows logo. After several minutes of waiting at this screen I grew impatient and shut off the computer. I have since seen the same exact results. I was wondering if anyone knew what the hell was going on? I'm on a 533MHZ Celeron with a crappy integrated graphics card and a likely just as crappy sound card. 192MB RAM, Windows 98SE. Please if anyone has any suggestions I'd greatly appreciate it. - Dami

That is kinda confusing because it seems to indicate two separate hardware problems. Cmos checksums normally indicate a motherboard battery that is dying. The 'odd clicking noises' from the hard drive normally indicate that the drive is dying.

Could it be the power supply? All I know is I've had a myriad of problems before but I've never had any sort of hardware failure and that's what it seems to be ;( Lordy.

My CMOS battery died recently and I got the checksum bit. After replacing the battery, I had to jumper the 'Clear CMOS Memory' terminals on the MOBO. Then it was OK.

Thank you. I'll look into all those solutions. This community is hella helpful. I'll definitely remember this place. - lUSER Dami

A bad hard drive would explain the "Cannot write to C:\" error, the unusual clicking noises, and the system running slow. Drives don't last forever.

The only problem is I heard both drives do that. Both of them dying at the same time would seem to be kinda weird, although, I'm starting to think that might be it.