I've been watching this thread with interest, as one of 'my PCs' has started throwing out lots of errors (I've still got 30+ to u/l from a couple of days ago)...4589185. I've had suspicions about the hard drive, SATA contoller and also memory, but given the number of times Win XP has had to be re-installed, to get it working again, the HD is at the top of the list. Cloning the drive with the right s/w would be ideal, from the aspect of time, but I suspect I'll go the 'manual' route for setting partitions. Aside from the CPU, sound card differences and minor differences of the GPU, the two PCs are twins - same board (MSI P35 Platinum), same RAM (4 X 1 Gb Patriot Extreme DDR2 800 running at 4-4-4-12) and same HD (SATA 500 Gb Hitachi DeskStar HDP725050GLA360) and the OSs were both XP Pro, until one of the XP Pro discs got mislaid and both BIOS revs are the same - the latest (last) for those boards!

The error messages I've seen in BOINC Manager, were typically (of the ones yet to u/l) something like 'output file not found', which made me think of HD, but could also indicate RAM I guess. My plan of action currently, is to replace the HD with a Samsung F1 750 Gb (using the Hitachi 500 as another drive in mine), replace the RAM with 2 X 2 Gb of OCZ ReaperX RAM and finally put to use a Vista 64 bit disc I've got lying around. Changing the GPU to something like an ATI 6870 is also likely, as the latest (Legacy) drivers for the 4800 series were good for fps, but not for 'crunching', hence my own PC using a pretty old driver. All this, of course, would open the doors to some 'small improvements' to my own PC and possibly have parts that will work just fine with an Asus P5K lying around, thereby upgrading an old Intel 3.2GHz P4 S@H cruncher to using an Intel Core 2 Duo 6550, thats also lying around! Something a little more modern and less likely to inflict heat-stroke on the user....at idle!

Any observations or comments (sensible snd printable!) would be appreciated.

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Don't take life too seriously, as you'll never come out of it alive!

One thing to remember when cloning a disk. If the source disk has damaged files on it, or is unstable, you can end up with a clone of a duff system if you are unlucky. A clean install of the operating system is always a better bet

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Thats what I reckoned....unfortunately. My partner has WoW installed and I'm not even thinking about how long that will all take to install/download and, of course I'll be the one doing the installation. For some reason, whenever I do a software installation, it always works that bit better or is more reliable - maybe being 'old school' isn't such a bad thing <all hail the DEC PDP-8>!

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Don't take life too seriously, as you'll never come out of it alive!

Floyd have you tried reinstalling the op yet I stoped getting the read errors on start up now that I have done a clean install even thou I did not wipe the old drive and I am still using it
The only other thing I can sergest is unpluging everything you don't need
DVD ROM 's WIFI cards other drives usb devices digital tv cards and leave only the gpu your using 1 h/d mouse keyboard and the network cable
Your prob being intermittent could mean other devices are faulty as that is a classic sign of a device that is on the way out but not the actual computer
eg dvd rom I once had was faulty and was cousing prob's I have had other prb's too like that
A reinstall of the op is the best way to test your ram aswell if there is a prob you will know then

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Floyd have you tried reinstalling the op yet I stoped getting the read errors on start up now that I have done a clean install even thou I did not wipe the old drive and I am still using it
The only other thing I can sergest is unpluging everything you don't need
DVD ROM 's WIFI cards other drives usb devices digital tv cards and leave only the gpu your using 1 h/d mouse keyboard and the network cable
Your prob being intermittent could mean other devices are faulty as that is a classic sign of a device that is on the way out but not the actual computer
eg dvd rom I once had was faulty and was cousing prob's I have had other prb's too like that
A reinstall of the op is the best way to test your ram aswell if there is a prob you will know then

The only Problem is that I have over a TB of data on this HD and I can't afford to lose it. If I do a clean install , then It wipes all the data , and I lose it.
As soon as I can afford to , I'll get another HD and install to it , see if that solves the Problem.

I can try to disconnect every thing one piece at a time and see what happens...

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Well that is what I did a new h/d and clean install to that and then I connected the old drive with the old installation on it and all my info too . It does have the 32 version on that drive .
When I first tried I had the older drive connected but could not install the ilgit new win7 64 I bought it keep asking me to put the other version of win 7 so I disconnected it and then installed it . I'll keep a eye on your progress
good luck

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Iona I have just upgraded my backup puter as well as the main system it's running XP pro
New m/b my old duo core 2 outa the main system and new ram
First I got blue screen of death no prob I expected it .Only because I didn't try and reinstall just let it try and boot sometime I do silly things .
In stead of a clean install I just reinstalled XP over the old one but choose to delete the old windows folder . I had 1 prob but that was because my ver of XP is called XP Pro by Johnny (hacked)
All the info was still there even bionic and the 4 Einstein units but they are useless as XP renames all the folders in users it add's WINDOWS to the end of the folders and that is the new installation it uses .The old folders are there just no longer used
You should be able to access all your old info cut or paste them into the new installation even bionic units just make shore you put them in the right folders before you reinstall bionic and it should pick them up
That's if you wish to keep all you files of the old installation
good luck

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The error messages I've seen in BOINC Manager, were typically (of the ones yet to u/l) something like 'output file not found', which made me think of HD, but could also indicate RAM I guess.

Do you have the system clock set to update to a time server? If so, that can be the issue.

What happens is the system clock changes by more than the "heartbeat" time and the BOINC manager goes by clock time, so it thinks the science app has finished, because it didn't get the "heartbeat" signal, but it can't find the output file. It restarts at the last checkpoint. If this happens a lot then the W/U can actually error out from too many restarts.

OBW too many dust bunnies can make the wall clock a run either too fast or too slow, so it might be time for a general clean out.

If you are seeing errors in the windows log files then you may have a real problem.

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Thats what I reckoned....unfortunately. My partner has WoW installed and I'm not even thinking about how long that will all take to install/download and, of course I'll be the one doing the installation. For some reason, whenever I do a software installation, it always works that bit better or is more reliable - maybe being 'old school' isn't such a bad thing <all hail the DEC PDP-8>!

If I am not mistaken, WoW caches all of its patch and update downloads. Been 5+ years since I played that though.

If that's still the case, then move the patch files to another machine and reinstall, then move the files back and patch.

Someone, somewhere, certainly will document how to do this if this is still what the WoW patcher does.

Ah, thats an interesting one, Gary. Yes, that PC is set to 'update' time (or sync) daily, from a server...but then, so is this one. It could quite easily be, 'just one of those things'....a clock re-sync when a WU finished, with a 'cascade' effect. I hadn't considered something as simple as that, as a cause. To be sure, I'll change it to update at 'start-up', rather than at a fixed time, which, as any Time Lord should know, are very few points in time! Being a 'kitty person', I'm aware of the bunnies - the air compressor getting fired-up in the back garden, usually deals with them! With some of the HSFs these days, especially the ones on GPUs; its the only way to keep them at bay.

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Don't take life too seriously, as you'll never come out of it alive!

maybe being 'old school' isn't such a bad thing <all hail the DEC PDP-8>!

Oh, I don't know, my /e would normally fail to boot on Monday mornings so I'd have a session of removing Flip-Chips, cleaning their contacts with a pencil eraser and replacing them. Then once the computer was working, typically at least one experiment power supply would fail as I switched them on...

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