THis is sorta a long story here. A while ago I decided to upgrade from win98 to windows XP. Like a fool I decided I'd try it with out formattying my HDD. Big mistake. Approx once a week I would get a message saying "unable to find hal.dll" and I would have to reinstall XP. Luckily this was not too big of a problem, just an hour long annoyance. Finally I got fed up. I backed up my hard drive and formatted it. Then, after installing a fresh copy of windows XP, I copied back my files and started over witha new OS. So life was good for about a month. Then last night, I turned off my computer when I went to sleep (on a side note, I normally keep it on day/night). Then this morning when I started up the computer it blew up in my face, metaphorically speaking. everything was fine until it got to the screen displaying all of the system info (irq #'s etc). Immediatly after "Verifying DMI Pool Data .........." The computer tried to boot from the HDD. At this point things stopped working. The computer basically had a seizure and didn't (and still wont) go any farther. To make things even more fun, when the computer siezed up, certain characters dissappeared from the screen and about 10 randomly colored symbols appeared on the screen. I have tried to reinstall windoze XP twice however it has done nothing but change the colors of the boxes that appear. Do you think that my HDD has gone bad? its only one year old. Or has something gone screwy else where? any help would be appreciated. I'm baffled.

How to prepare to Upgrade Windows98 and Windows ME to Windows XP: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q316639

I bought a brand new Maxtor that had (and still has) bad sectors so a dead 1 year old drive wouldnt suprise me. I would go to the Website of whoever makes the drive and download the utility for diagnosing drive errors. They all have them now and it will be easy enough to check. The usually run from a floppy so Windows is not needed to check it. Jimi_l

From what you are describing I would think it is more of a video card or motherboard issue. I say this because I had originally bought a GeForce 4 ti 4600 PNY card and after install it did the same @@ !! @@ crazy symbol all over the screen then would lock the pc and die. When I got a replacment card all was good. If your video card is new or has been overclocked / overheated I would check that out. If that is not it I would check the motherboard. Funny symbols and just basic junk does not sound like a harddrive issue. You would get a specific error code and message if your drive died. A good quick test would be to boot off of a Win98 or 95 bootdisk and see if you still get symbols. Try to access the drive from the bootdisk and see if you can browse it.

Update: I used the testing toolz that you guys suggested. Apparently my HDD is fine... I think that it might be the mobo. I've had other problems with it, for example, when I o/c the RAM the system freezes if I do anything more than look at it. Maybe I'll invest in a new one of those guys.

Hi! I have a very serious problem. I've bought a Maxtor 40 GB, 5400 rpm in February this year. In june I think my system started having problems. At first it happened once or twice a week. last days it happened for up to 8 times a day. My computer starts normaly (I had dual boot Windows XP/Windows 98), I usually use XP. So, XP starts normaly; no matter if I watch Tuner or computer is just hibernating suddenly the screen turns blue and in 1-2 seconds the system restarts. The messege on the blue screen is some error codes and starting dump of physical memory. I have to mention one thing more: let's say I watch a movie from a video-CD (so the computer is not using the HDD), suddenly I hear the HDD stoping and after a few minutes or if I move the mouse system restarts. 2 The system is an AMD Duron 750Mhz, Ati Rage video card, KWorld TV Tuner, Connexant Modem, 128 Mb Ram, 1 Cd-Rom (Philips) and one CD-RW (Teac). 2 days ago, instead of going hibernate is shutted down. And this didn't happen once. It shutted down 2 or 3 times that day. I mention that in the last time it started reporting bad sectors on the XP partition. The HDD is still under warranty. I went to my provider with it, he tryed to format it using MAX Blast (or something) and it reported more bad sectors. Finally, he held my HDD for service, today he told me that they managed to "fix" it. It's true, now it doesn't report bad sectors but after installing XP (formatting NTFS first, before service XP was on FAT32) when I tryed to intall my modem my computer restarted again and it happens each time I try to install my modem (I think it tries to write on the bad sectors). My questions after this long story is how can I prove them (service) that the HDD is totally damaged and to make them replace it with a new one (IBM)? Please help me, I'm desperate!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I mention that on Win98 it works fine (but I don't use 98 for more than one hour and only when I have to)