WinXP died, virus or what?

[fritzi93]

I have to agree: with multi-OS installs on a drive you're asking for trouble. Likewise with multiple partitions on your OS drive.

Easiest to have a smallish, fast drive (or SSD) with one partition and only the OS/programs on it. That simplifies things and BTW, it will be much quicker to image. (My OS drive takes ~ 10 minutes to image to another hard drive).

If you have either a WD or Seagate drive in your computer, you can use a basic free version of Acronis available from either manufacturer. The differences between them are merely cosmetic. Neither can do incremental backups, but can do a whole disc image reliably.

[bevills1]

I did reformat the partition before doing the WinXP fresh install, and I also restored recent image of the first partition of the first sata drive where boot.ini and other boot files are which should have eliminated problems on that partition. I really believe it's some hardware issue and believe repartition and reformat both drives would result in persistence of the problem which would be a big waste of time imo. I'll know more when I open the PC case again.

[Nelson37]

Well that's great, if you're so certain of that and that you don't need to clean the temp files or run msconfig correctly then you must know all you need to fix it yourself.

Do report back and let us know what you found out.

[fritzi93]

As already mentioned, your image of the "first partition" is FUBARed. You gotta do a disc image of the entire drive.

[bevills1]

RAM was removed, cleaned and replaced as suggested in reply #26 and #27 resulting in no post with long beeps and same symptoms posted at http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2109735. It appears motherboard replacement is in order which I was thinking of doing anyway especially considering the age of this old one.

[nic2k4]

That's a little late, but if you're getting beep codes after cleaning the memory chances are you simply didn't insert it correctly or all the way in.

[TreeTops]

Big article in CPU magazine today about motherboards dying. Those bought around 2001 have capacitors that leak and the board dies. How old is yours?

[bevills1]

I inserted memory several times with same problem persisting and have never had a problem inserting memory correctly, and I'm convinced I encountered the same problem as in the link in my reply #35.

This board is around that age as I bought it between 2000 to 2003 I think but don't recall precise time of purchase.

[davexnet]

I think the problem with capacitors existed at least until 2006. The board in one of my PC's from that era developed
leaking capacitors after only one year of use. I replaced them and the board is still in use. These caps are close to
the cpu socket in the voltage regulator circuit. Perhaps their usage and the proximity to the CPU (heat issue) is to blame.

[bevills1]

The second PC mentioned in my initial post that exhibited similar symptoms but recovered for now was obtained between 2004 to 2006, and I wouldn't be surprised if it dies in a similar fashion in the near future. I guess I"m lucky to get the years of use that I got from both these PCs.