Motherboard dying?

[quaxo]

You know, I've got to say I'm very very impressed with the free live phone support I received from Kaspersky about reactivating my Kaspersky Internet Security. I had misplaced my activation code and they were kind enough to dig it up and email it back to me within a short time of calling them.

Don't know if I'll get around to formatting tonight, I'm a bit tired. I'll post back with a status update once I do so.

[Aegis]

Always nice to learn about a good customer service experience. 

[quaxo]

I haven't forgotten about this, backup my data is going quite slow though. Like I said, the system is acting slow in general, even copying. Still has at least 2 hours left (so it says anyway).

Everything is hooked back up now and there don't seem to be anymore drive dropping. I had two more modular connection on the power supply, so I pulled out some more of the cables I didn't use before and seperated power cables so the IDE drive is on one power cable, the CD drive is on one, SATA drive has its own, and the case fans and CPU cooler are on one. IDE drive and DVD drive are still sharing the same IDE cable. Ordered some SATA DVD drives from the distributor this morning which should arrive tomorrow morning. Think I might swipe one of those and stick it in my machine and take this IDE DVD drive out and just put it in another junk system or external enclosure.

[patio]

Have you ruled out just doing a Repair Install and re-installing the Drivers ? ?

Course nuttin better than a clean install every now and then...

[quaxo]

Have you ruled out just doing a Repair Install and re-installing the Drivers ? ?

Course nuttin better than a clean install every now and then...

I thought about doing that then just decided to do a complete wipe of the C: and D: drives. D: was my old backup partition for my laptop, but that's getting moved to the E: drive (large partition on the SATA) which I use to store all of my media files and other downloads. Given the age of the IDE drive, I just feel better if the backup is on the newer SATA...... now watch my SATA drive crash this weekend! 

Anyway, once everything is backup up from those drives, I'll probably just remove both partitions and make it one whole partition for Windows and programs to be installed on.

The second partition on the SATA drive is for games, mostly World of Warcraft. Considering the last time I installed Warcraft and Burning Crusade and applied all the patches took 4 hours, I just keep the same installation and even copy it to my other computers when needs be. WoW doesn't require its registry entries to work properly and even recreates them if they're not there during certain patches.

Anyway, almost finished moving everything to the SATA drive now. It's just taking so long because I'm actually going through all my folders and deleting stuff I don't need anymore. Been meaning to do that for a long time, figure now is as good a time as any.

[quaxo]

Alright, speed bump.

Everything is backed up and ready to go. The old IDE DVD has been removed and a SATA DVD drive has been put in. The IDE drive is now on its own. Everything is connected again as it should be: all fans, CPU cooler, drives.

Popped in the Windows CD and booted from it. It goes to "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration..." for about 5 seconds, then abruptly rebooted.

The second, third, and fourth time, I got the message "inf file txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing (status 4096)" right after it said it was inspecting the computer's hardware.

Read this might be because of a dirty or scratched CD. The CD looked flawless and I gave it a cleaning even though it looked spotless. Fifth time, setup started... 

Anyway, let's see how this goes for the rest of the installation. It's just repartitioned and is formatting the drive now.

[patio]

Best of Luck as this has been a long journey...

[quaxo]

Well, aside from that little hiccup, everything seems to be going smooth. I've got Windows reinstalled now and I'm updating Kaspersky and downloading Firefox. Speed seems to have returned to normal and none of the drives or anything seem to be dropping out.

Other than getting a SATA DVD put in, I've made a few changes in cabling and added a few more cables to the power supply so each cable is shared less. The SATA hard drive and DVD share a cable (as the power supply only came with one SATA power cable with 2 ends on it). The IDE drive is on it's own power cable and IDE cable. The side, front, and rear case fans and the CPU cooler share a cable, and the video card is still on it's own cable.

Like I said, so far so good... although I still haven't isolated exactly what the issue was before. Not sure if it was the power supply or the Windows installation going out, but it's running fast and strong without issues for half an hour now, which is more than it was doing before. Anyway, thanks for all the help. I'll post back if it starts acting up again.

[patio]

Good News indeed...
Now do an image before anything else...verify it and burn it to DVD.