hard drive disappears after a few minutes of inactivity

[tomwitt]

hello,

i have a compaq dp2000 with 166mmx chip, a 2.1 gb hard drive and 16mb of ram. it was recently upgraded to win 98. no network card.

the pc works fine when someone uses it but when they turn away for about ten or eleven minutes, the screen freezes then turns black and gives a 1790 disk zero error. it the option to reboot but when i try that, it gives me a non-system disk error (like when you have a floppy in the drive). it appears that the c: drive is no longer recognized by the pc. when i do a cold boot, the drive is recognized as normal. when someone stops using the pc for ten, eleven minutes the same story repeats itself.

i have tried the following fixes:
1. disabled power managment in both the bios and win98
2. replaced the video driver with the standard video driver
3. ran compaq's latest utilities on the disk seven times. compaq told me if the disk passes seven times, it should be ok.
4. disable find fast in office 97
5. disconnected the cd rom to see if there was a conflict with the hard drive and cd rom on the same ide controller.
6. upgraded the bios and the bios on the hard disk.
7. checked the physical connections to the disk.

this crash happens in windows 98, safe mode and dos.

i have tried everything that i can think of. please help because i am ready to strap this thing to my ankles and jump in a deep lake.

thanks,
tom

[Bob-NB]

It sounds like you are on the right track...except just throw the thing in the lake..without it being strapped to your leg.

It would appear that you have done everything reasonable to analyze your problem. Despite the "seven times is good" speech from tech support, it appears you may simply have a bad hard drive. I would have gone for an interuption from the power supply or a cable problem, but you have indicated that you have checked these. You may want to replace the cable before the lake trip, to check it one more time. A question: When is goes black is there any spin-up from the drive at all, or upon reboot, are there any noises coming from the drive? Do you have access to a second HD to see if it too frezes-up and goes dead? Good luck and good swimming....PS..I once had an intermittant problem with a Y connector from the power supply which would cause the HD to mysteriously lose power and quit.

[This message has been edited by Bob-NB (edited 08-17-99).]

[sunman]

well.. call COMPAQ tech support then http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif
we dun juz pay high price for a branded pc for nothing http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif