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PC FREEZES ON STARTUP

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by pinkice26062 Jun 18, 2004 last reply Jun 19, 2004

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I'm working on a gateway essential amd 1000, 128mb ram, 40 gig wd hard drive. It was infected with numerous malware and viruses. It would not boot up. I lowlevel format and then tried to install windows 98 first. after the first reboot before windows finished installing, computer froze. things I did to fix- replaced ram, video card, pulled all pci cards out even before installing os. tried with windows ME also.same thing. ran diagnosics on system with diagnosics softer. shows everything ok.any ideas?

12 replies

by jamesrl Jun 18, 2004

Swap the hard disk with another Take your existing HD as a slave, and a known good one as you master/boot disk- borrow one if you have to, from an existing PC, and launch in safe mode.

Not every diagnostic tool will catch every subtle error in a HD and if there are errors in the boot sectors, its over.

As a PC tech I always used this technique - I had a HD with the OS, Norton Utilities and other tools on it.

James

by pinkice26062 Jun 19, 2004

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by jsarinana Jun 18, 2004

Run killdisk from http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm and then reinstall O.S.

by pinkice26062 Jun 19, 2004

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by w2ktechman Jun 18, 2004

After a low level format I would say either the HDD was bad or a critical driver was missing or corrupt. Boot into safe mode and update the drivers. If this still fails try replacing the HDD.

by pinkice26062 Jun 19, 2004

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by pinkice26062 Jun 18, 2004

I installed the hd in a hp computer and did a full system recovery. I had no problem. hard drive working good. would that tell me that the motherboard is bad? or is there something else I can do.

by pinkice26062 Jun 18, 2004

It also freezes in safe mode.

by marvin165 Jun 19, 2004

Look on the system board near the memory module slots for the capacitors (cylinders about 3/8 inch in diameter about 1 inch tall) There should be about 5 of them in a row. Inspect the top of them to confirm that they are not puffed or leaking oil/resin at the base. If they are puffed and leaking and the main board needs to be replaced.