Anyone Love a Mystery?

[dr_roberts49]

I have a real mystery on my hands. I thought I should share it with all of you, so here goes.

Yesterday, I finally decided to replace my old 15GB Maxtor drive. It's been my primary Master for years. Has been in 3 different computer upgrades, from Pentium II to my current P4. Best Buy had a good deal on an 80GB Maxtor with 8MB cache. I swapped the new drive with my Primary Slave so I could use Maxtor's MaxBlast to copy my entire old drive to the new one. Something I've done on my kid's computers, friends, and others, including myself. That was the 1st problem. MaxBlast wouldn't work. Boot from the CD only caused a long freeze at the "analyze" phase. Did it several times, even tried the floppie route, which did the same exact thing.

I then tried loading MaxBlast from windows. It completed the install just fine, but when I went to run the app, I got the Windows-error-send-a-report-to-Microsoft message. This happened after several tries. Went to Maxtor's website and searched their entire knowledge base, but found nothing that was close to my problem. So I called them. Got right through, and the tech was very polite, but was just as puzzled as I was. He went down the list of all the same things I had already tried. We both decided to just format the drive through XP's disk manager, which worked. This was going to take awhile, so I thanked the tech. I told him I would try MaxBlast again after the drive was formated. We both agreed it should work. Well, it didn't. Rather that waste anymore time, I used another program I've used before, called "Drive-2-Drive". I had to upgrade it to the new XP version, which cost me $19.95. So much for the good deal at Best Buy

About 40 minutes later, I transfered my entire drive info from the old to the new. I shutdown and did the hardware exchange, booted into the bios, and everything worked. Booted into Windows just fine.

About 30 minutes later, my computer started beeping. I immediately checked all my temps, both through my hardware monitors and through the bios. No extreme heating. Everything cool and well below the danger zone. Checked at ABIT's website (I have an ABIT IS7 mobo) and went to Award BIOS beep codes. My 2 short beeps were for memory or video problems. The beeps were lasting for several seconds, then about 3 minutes of silence before starting up again. I ran the latest version of Sandra, and a memory utility I have, and found no problems with my memory or video card (NVIDIA FX 2600). I did notice, that after 2 re-boots, the beeps completely stopped.

It was getting to my bedtime, so I shutdown for the night. This morning, I fired up my computer, and noticed 2 things.
#1. the first program I launced, would take considerable time to open. After that, everything ran fine. I rebooted twice with the same results.
#2. The beeps came back after my computer had been on for about 30 minutes.

I ran all the same tests as the night before, rechecked my BIOS settings, even shut off my computer, and examined all my cable connections. No problems. I rebooted my computer with 2 cold starts and 3 resets. The beeping completely stopped. I did get one set of 2 short beeps about half an hour later, but no more after that. It's been about 90 minutes now. WEIRD!

I just downloaded NVIDEA's latest drivers. IThere have been about 2 updates in recent months, but I'm one to believe that if everything works, leave it alone, so I didn't do any of those updates.

I've just set a restore point in XP, and will remove my current drivers before installing the new ones. I've also considered flashing my BIOS, although I saw nothing in the recent bios that would give me any major improvements. Once again, everything works, but maybe not anymore?

So, here are my concerns. The slow start on the 1st app after a restart (cold or warm). I tried several apps, and no matter which one I choose, it starts slow. Everything loads fine after that.

The beeping is also a concern, but it seems to have gone away. I did run PowerMax, Maxtor's drive utility, and it found my drive to be in full working order. Did a full surface scan this morning.

I'm going to check back here later to see if anyone has any ideas. I don't work today, so have time to play around with this. Maybe it's just a breaking in period, but I've never encountered anything like this before. Stuff works, or it doesn't. Then again, it might just be something that happened when I transfered from my old drive to the new. Never did that with XP. I'm still wondering why Maxtor's MaxBlast utility didn't work.

Anyway, there's my mystery. I would appreciate any input, and I apologize for the long posting. I hope I didn't leave anything out.

Robert

Here's my setup:

ABIT IS7 mobo
512 MB DDR3500 in duel mode
Hyperthreading enabled
P4 2.4C
800FSB
NVIDEA FX 5200
Santa Cruz sound card
new Maxtor 80GB primary master 72000rpm 8mb cache
Maxtor 80GB primary slave 72000rpm 2mb cache
Maxtor 160GB SATA for video storage 72000rpm 8mb cache
DVD drive (SONY)
DVD 8X burner NEC 2500A
500 WATT power supply
6 case fans
Aspire Alien-X tower case
Coolmaster Jet cpu fan
FanMaster reobus
Windows XP pro, all updated.

[osprey4]

Just on the surface, I've never had any luck running a cloned drive with XP with either Maxblast or Ghost.

[dr_roberts49]

I understand, but I've tried running several programs, and they all run perfectly. Just the first app on a reboot takes too long to load. The beeping has come back and is extremely annoying. I wish there was some way to disable it. I can't find anything wrong in my hardware or software, but I will definitely conside what you just said. I'm going to update the video driver and see what happens, then the BIOS. I'm also going to put my old drive back in and see what happens. I'll bet the farm, that if the beeps go away, I'll be spending my afternoon reinstalling everything again. Hopefully if it comes to that, I'll get the XP update CD from Microsoft. It's been nearly 2 weeks since they emailed me and told it was shipped. Must be coming by boat

I'll keep everyone posted on how this all turns out. I guess I'm just pissed about paying $19.95 to Future Systems for their XP upgrade. The things we do to save time and money. Sometimes it just doesn't work.

Robert

[John Prophet]

I have used ghost plenty of times..copied xp plenty with no issues.

I would NEVER..repeat NEVER even TRY to use, forgive me, "crap" like maxblast or any other manufacturers stuff....it just seems to be too troublesome...to "gimmicky" or flakey.

You probably just should have used norton ghost...make the ghost boot floppy....put the new drive in place of the old one....then take the second done and just temporarily hang it off the end of one of the cdrom cables etc....boot to the ghost floppy...copy the drive....shutdown..take the old drive out altogether.

viola, instant easy swapover.

---

with the maxblast stuff...I have no clue what that software even does...I am too scared to even try it....or WD or seagate software....wayyyyy too many help threads here from peeps who have tried to use it.

--

stick to fdisk, format and ghost

(although of course you dont need to "prep" a drive with fdisk or anything else to ghost to it etc)

JP

[Dooin' it]

May I ask a dumb question??? (I know some folks say there are no dumb questions, but I should probably know this by now)......

Dumb question #1..............

How exactly does "Ghost" work?? I realize it makes a backup of your entire HD but where does it put it?? IOW, if you totally chunk up w/ a virus, bad install, etc. etc. how can ghost access a part of the drive that's not affected & make everything good again?? (And any other uses for Ghost you can think of)




Dumb question (maybe not as dumb) #2..........

I've seen our "computer guy" here at work setup a bunch of dells that we had to change from Win2000 to Win98SE for our specific network/serve/software purposes. In an effort to quicken the process of making all the HD's on the desktops the same, he pulled out what looked lik a bar-code scanner for grocery stores that had an IDE cable attached & apparently "copied" one HD to another, to another, to another 'til they were all done. Any babble on this little device?????? TIA

[dr_roberts49]

Thanks, JP. I agree with you about Ghost. When I worked at Hopkins, that what we used. Unfortunately, I don't own it myself. I did buy Drive-2-Drive by Future Systems Solutions a couple of years ago, and never had any problems. I even recommended it to users who were not too computer literate, because it was simple and easy. I've never used their new XP version, called Casper XP until yesterday. The reviews on CNET and ZDNET were very positive, and since I had such good success with their Windows 98 version, I felt okay about it. I'm going to keep plugging away here. I'm tending more toward a hardware/bios conflict. I'm going to have some lunch right now, and then get back into it. I did come across some interesting postings on ABIT's forum. I'll keep everyone posted. The people on TechIMO are the best, and I value all your opinions the most.

Robert

[RAR]

Dooin' it, you can use Ghost to make an image of the drive and then copy back to a new drive. To do that you can either ghost it to a network drive, a slaved drive, or an external drive or cd burner. Because it works from DOS, the easiest way is to slave it because then you don't need to attach to a network or load drivers (in DOS) for the external drive.

To just Ghost one drive to the other, you just slave them and choose the disk to disk copy option. We were doing 20gb drives and it took about 7-10 minutes to copy them.

[Dooin' it]

Hmmmmmm.........thanks RAR........and that begs the next question......

Since I only have XP on a Dell at home and I have ME or 98 on a couple other systems, would it be possible to Ghost my Dell drive to another by slaving it, then just remove/add hardware in the Device manager to swap?

(Obviously, my XP Dell copy only works with a Dell-bios mobo so I'm guessing that ghosting is my only option)

Errr......just thought again.......XP will shutdown 'cuz it'll see the hardware change, right? Grrrrrrrrrrr!!

[dr_roberts49]

Sometimes, it's the simple things that work. After lunch I was prepared for a long afternoon of troubleshooting and possibly giving up and doing a backup and a fresh install. So much for cloning my drive and the $19.95 I spent on the upgrade.

I really didn't want to spend the day doing that, so I unplugged my primary master and slave. Both the cables and the power cables. Then I plugged them back in. I crossed my fingers and powered it up. Well, that was over 3 hours ago. I'm not ready to do a victory dance yet, but I'm feeling pretty good right now. I also checked out the problem of the 1st app after restart starting slow, and that's gone too. I ran several apps, ran my scanner and my printer. Played a round of Quake III Arena and SimCity 4 Deluxe. No problems. I'll post back here towards midnight. To beep or not to beep? That is the question

Robert

[crossedup]

Dooinit, were you thinking of something like this? http://www.ics-iq.com/show_item_163.cfm It sounds like what you meant when you mentioned a bar code scanner