Hi Guys
I have a problem with my system and have tried all sorts of ways to sort it out but to no avail. Please help if you can.
My problem started a few days ago when I installed XP Service Pack 2 on my system. It ran fine for about 30mins then hung and on reboot flashed blue screen IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error... OK so time to rollback, I thought but when I tried to boot in Safe Mode I got the same error. I was totally stuck. Eventually, I booted from my XP cd and ran Repair... I had no end of trouble, I ran the batch to unstall SP2 but it just gave a bunch of errors so I did, I admit, a not very clever thing... I reinstalled XP over the top of the old one. I booted up and finally was able to get back on to my system but of course I had problems. For one, everytime I opened My Computer, I would get errors.
So I decided to install a new instance of XP on my smaller secondary disk (my backup disk). This seemed ok, until I tried to copy my .pst file to the new disk; I got a CRC error, and after chkdsk fixed a bunch of problems on that partition, I lost the file.
Things got worse when after a reboot I got an error saying that my boot disk was corrupt or failed and please insert a bootable disk. I tried booting from CD but it didn't work. So raced out and bought a new HDD, came home and when I tried to reboot (yes I live in hope)... it booted. I was thrilled until a few hours in, I got an error that C: was not there. That was when I noticed that my CDRW was also missing and as they were both on the same IDE cable, I decided to check the cable ( I remembered that I had recently removed a faulty 3rd drive so maybe something got loose)... so I pushed in the cables and it worked. BUT the system would come up... stay up for a while (sometimes a day, sometimes 15mins) and then it would fail again. I tried switching the cables but still the same problem.
I am now thinking that maybe it is the motherboard... but before I go out and spend even more money on a new one... does anyone have any ideas on what I am doing wrong? I am so upset at the idea of loosing my data (remember I used my backup drive for the new install).
Thanks
Lab
PS. My pc has the following specs (don't laugh):
Motherboard: Chaintec 9EJL1 (Apogee) - Intel P4 750Mhz - 768Mb RAM
Primary IDE : 40Gb Fujitsu HDD (2 Partitions [XP Boot + System on C:]
LiteOn CDRW Drive
Second IDE : 10Gb WD HDD (1 Partition [2nd XP Boot])
Other: Nvidia GForce video/ Soundblaster Pro.
OpSys: Windows XP Professional SP1
