I would replace 1 part at a time. Start with the Mobo. then the PSU and if all else fails the CPU

I see what you are saying, but you are going to end up costing yourself more time and money in the long run to fix your issue. I would suggest simply ordering yourself a $15 psu tester. Test your psu, if that's the issue then buy a new one and your happy and running again and haven't already bought a motherboard that you didn't need. Then if your psu turns out ok, replace the motherboard, yeah you've spent $15 you could have not spent however you have a nice piece of troubleshooting hardware you can use again and you're back up and running.

Is your motherboard giving you any kind of error code beeps or anything? If not more than likely it's not a ram or cpu issue. If it is giving you codes look them up on the manufacturers website and decide which move you need to make. (Surely with you being a Seti guy you have a friend who will let you at least lift their psu for a little bit to test with?!)

As I said earlier no bleeps and no display on screen, all fans run and the word ASUS changes from blue to red as it is supposed to do when powered up. Yes it could be MOBO or PSU or Processor, all are about 3.5 years old. If it is the MOBO I don't want an old PSU on a new MOBO, or processor.

I have a week till the next computer fair, so will think it over.

Bernie.

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Maybe the local computer store has a second hand mainboard on the shelf :)

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Rig name: "x6Crunchy"
OS: Win 7 x64
MB: Asus M4N98TD EVO
CPU: AMD X6 1055T 2.8(1,2v)
GPU: 2x Asus GTX560ti
Member of: Dutch Power Cows

Maybe the local computer store has a second hand mainboard on the shelf :)

We really don't have many "local computer stores" round here. Mostly PC World and a nice new Best Buy, or if you really have no choice a Maplins. I buy all my computer bits at my local, bi-monthly computer fair held in a local school, masses of choice and the prices aren't to bad. Next one is next Sunday.

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Maybe the local computer store has a second hand mainboard on the shelf :)

We really don't have many "local computer stores" round here. Mostly PC World and a nice new Best Buy, or if you really have no choice a Maplins. I buy all my computer bits at my local, bi-monthly computer fair held in a local school, masses of choice and the prices aren't to bad. Next one is next Sunday.

Not to mention if your Best Buy is like the one here prices are waaaayyyyy to high. In my last posting I was responding to skildude not you! Haha, any who best of luck.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

theres always taking the whole thing in and having it checked out.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Power supply is the cheapest thing to try first. A computer store in your area should test it for free. If it's working OK, then probably motherboard has expired. CPUs rarely go bad unless they are overclocked to hell.

OK, it was the power supply, a new one has the machine up and running.

As it has been out of action for a while, I decided to update things first, like video drivers, anti-virus, and Windoze updates.

Well all of the above fail saying the files are corrupt or damaged. The Nvidia installer failed half way through and I now have only the default video driver. Tried 3 times, even downloaded it on my main PC as I thought it might be corrupt, still fails.

Looks like a re-install of XP required.

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OK, it was the power supply, a new one has the machine up and running.

As it has been out of action for a while, I decided to update things first, like video drivers, anti-virus, and Windoze updates.

Well all of the above fail saying the files are corrupt or damaged. The Nvidia installer failed half way through and I now have only the default video driver. Tried 3 times, even downloaded it on my main PC as I thought it might be corrupt, still fails.

Looks like a re-install of XP required.

You might try running chkdsk from safe mode.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

OK, it was the power supply, a new one has the machine up and running.

As it has been out of action for a while, I decided to update things first, like video drivers, anti-virus, and Windoze updates.

Well all of the above fail saying the files are corrupt or damaged. The Nvidia installer failed half way through and I now have only the default video driver. Tried 3 times, even downloaded it on my main PC as I thought it might be corrupt, still fails.

Looks like a re-install of XP required.

Before you try a complete re install
Try running "sfc /scannow"
I that doesn't help then try a repair install first

yeah it sounds like the constant up and down may have fried your HDD. It does happen.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Another question if you don't mind. I have a second machine that is exhibiting occasional HDD problems. So I am going to changed the HDD.

What "copy/cloning" programs can you recommend. I used to use Norton Ghost but seem to have mislaid the disk. Better if it is free, but don't mind paying a reasonable amount for a good program.

Thanks

Bernie

PS. The original machine in this question has 2 corrupt HDD, so a new one for there as well but it will need a re-install.

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Another question if you don't mind. I have a second machine that is exhibiting occasional HDD problems. So I am going to changed the HDD.

What "copy/cloning" programs can you recommend. I used to use Norton Ghost but seem to have mislaid the disk. Better if it is free, but don't mind paying a reasonable amount for a good program.

Thanks

Bernie

PS. The original machine in this question has 2 corrupt HDD, so a new one for there as well but it will need a re-install.

Macrium Reflect has always served me well, it also has a Windows PE component that can be purchased separately(Includes Linux and Bart by default) to make an easy recovery CD. It can backup to a hard drive, network share, cd, etc. For the full package it's like $40. Best purchase I have made in a while as far as cloning etc goes. It can even perform automated backups etc. They have a free option if you want to try it out. http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp, it's what I replaced Norton Ghost with, and so far it's performed much nicer.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

What "copy/cloning" programs can you recommend. I used to use Norton Ghost but seem to have mislaid the disk. Better if it is free, but don't mind paying a reasonable amount for a good program.

I've used Acronis True Image with good success.

Acronis is a good one too, I used it but had issues which caused me to go with Macrium. I think Acronis even has a free version. http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/ go to the downloads and select a "free trial version".

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Another question if you don't mind. I have a second machine that is exhibiting occasional HDD problems. So I am going to changed the HDD.

What "copy/cloning" programs can you recommend. I used to use Norton Ghost but seem to have mislaid the disk. Better if it is free, but don't mind paying a reasonable amount for a good program.

Thanks

Bernie

PS. The original machine in this question has 2 corrupt HDD, so a new one for there as well but it will need a re-install.

Macrium Reflect has always served me well, it also has a Windows PE component that can be purchased separately. For the full package it's like $40. Best purchase I have made in a while as far as cloning etc goes. It can even perform automated backups etc. They have a free option if you want to try it out. http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp, it's what I replaced Norton Ghost with, and so far it's performed much nicer.

This is of interest to me......
I dunno what to do right now, but I need to make a decision in the relatively near future.

As some of you know, I just went through a painful HD crash on my daily drive, had to transition from XP to 7, and it cost me a lotta gray hairs.
As if I didn't have enough already.

I have been buying Seagate Constellation server class drives (I only learned a short while ago there was a difference between server and consumer class drives), so I should be good to go for quite a while.

BUT...I need to decide whether to get software to back up to CD/DVD or get another drive installed and run a real time cloning program that will make a bootable copy on the second drive.
OR go to a raid setup on my daily driver.

I just don't know what is the best solution.....
I only know I don't wanna go through that again.
I need a solution, that upon drive failure, I can be up and running when and where I was within a very short time without loss of data.

And I am not looking for freeware......the cost is not really the object.
It's the best solution that I need.
Any advice?

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Here is my setup. I have one drive on my main machine that's for nothing but backups, same on the server. I run raid on both boxes, but not on my backup drives. I image the entire system and have a nice little robocopy script that transfers each machines backup to the opposite machine along with leaving a copy there. In the end I have at least dual redundancy in case of failure. You just need the right software and a place to put it all. Try out Acronis, Macrium, or whatever else you can find a fiddle until you are happy.

Personally I like Macrium, you can make a nice Windows PE recovery disk which has a nice ui along with image explorers etc. It also can be configured for network access etc so you can access your images on remote machines. Then you select restore, select your image and what drive you want it on and give it about 20 minutes to an hour depending on size of the image, speed of the network, and speed of your disks and you have a working machine again.

I keep a full working fresh install image of both my machines along with a backup created each night. It has only cost me time to set it up and a little money but it's worth the peace of mind. If you want to go extreme with it you do your imaging and backups then also run something like carbonite that backs up to the web and you have triple redundancy. I used to do that as well and it worked really nice, but I saw no need when I brought my server back online.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

Last time I needed to work on a faulty hard disk (data recovery, rather than simple backup), I got a copy of Paragon Partition Manager. I hit an installation problem, and their technical support was extremely thorough for a cheap program. But the program itself, which I managed to use while they were still working on the problem, did the job I needed it for with no problems at all. That involved copying a hidden partition, something which Acronis couldn't do.

Last time I needed to work on a faulty hard disk (data recovery, rather than simple backup), I got a copy of Paragon Partition Manager. I hit an installation problem, and their technical support was extremely thorough for a cheap program. But the program itself, which I managed to use while they were still working on the problem, did the job I needed it for with no problems at all. That involved copying a hidden partition, something which Acronis couldn't do.

Hence another good markup for Macrium, it does block level imaging, if it's on the disk hidden or not it gets it. Which means you can't transfer your backup to a smaller hard drive, well unless you use robocopy to mount and extract the files. I've done that a few times, still works wonderfully.

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Traveling through space at ~67,000mph!

I'll throw my solution out there for you to consider, I use Active@Disk Image - made by the same company that makes Active@Kill Disk, which many use to securely erase drives. One nice thing is for the price ($39, but it's Canadian so in the US you'll also pay a foreign transaction fee), you get 3 licenses. I use it on my network to back up all my machines to a NAS device. I have a gigabit network, backups are scheduled to back up to one of 2 drives on alternating days, and usually take less than 10 minutes. I keep 4 or 5 versions per disk/per machine in the NAS, so if either drive in the NAS dies, I can hopefully get the data from the other drive. I've had to use the backups occasionally, never had any issues.

-Dave

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