[friday010]

Hello all.
Got a perplexing problem. To me anyway.
I run windows xp professional on a althon thunderbird 750, 3 sticks 512 pc133, 3 hard drives. Boot is 40 gig w/no partition, 1 80 gig w/2 partitions and a 13 gig, 1 combo cd-rw/dvd player and ye olde floppy.
I can boot windows if I start from a complete power down. Use the computer on the internet - as long as I don't run any music/chat/messenger programs or try to go into control panel or my computer - it seems to work just fine. But the moment I open one of the offending programs it hangs - completely freezes for about 60 seconds - 2 minutes and then releases. The computer will not shut off from windows, nor restart. If I do hit reset, when it hits the start up screen and tries to detect the hard drives - is says master = none, slave = none and gives me the "hit a key to reboot" I do this and it's the endless loop of no hard drives
If I do a hard power down and restart, it will detect the hard drives and load windows.

I have not received a single system error message.

XP will not let me perform any diagnostics as it will not let me open any thing.

Today I went out and bought a new hard drive, and it won't format from the install disk...It opens the format utility, lets me choose my option....then goes black and gives me the error, please removed diskette and hit ctrl-alt-del.
Normally I just troubleshoot and fix problems myself - and am not well versed in the specific tech speak - so bear with me.

 

[A Hawk]

Welcome to TSG
Go into bios and make sure HD auto detect and plug and pray are enabled. Then disconnect the 80 and the 13 g Hd's and see if the offending progams will work. Also how many watts is your Power supply?? As for the new HD try formatting it with the Xp cd. Also is there an OS on the 80 and 13 gig Hd's or are they just for storage??

 

[crjdriver]

The first thing I would do is download the hd mgf’s utility for checking the drive. Make sure the drive is not failing before trying anything else. As to formatting a new drive, that is done from disk management. From DM you will create one or more partitions then format with the file system of your choice [if the drive is <32 gig if larger than 32 the only option in DM is ntfs.]

Your boot drive must have at least one partition; by “No partition” I think you mean that you just have a single partition on the drive.

 

[crjdriver]

After rereading your post, I would also download and run a ram tester. It will make a bootable floppy and run from that. A complete check of the memory will take hours; so you might want to let it run overnight.
Here is a link to doc memory.

If hd and memory checkout ok, then we can start looking at other things. I always like to start with the things that do not cost money and both of these are free.