Hardware problems

[vass0922]

I have a friend with a P166 with 16 megs ram (I believe)
She's 800 miles away so I don't know all that much about her puter.
The problem is, her computer is crashing constantly even before she gets into Windoze
At first we suspected a possible corruption of the FAT tables (wasnt' reading the hard drive at all) so we went through and deleted all the partitions. We then started creating new partitions and fdisk was crashing quite a bit (which is odd even for a MS product).
We went through reset all the BIOS settings to default to see if it was in there and we were able to create the primary partition, make it active.. and when we were creating teh extended partition it got hung up there again. (It said the partition was created but we couldnt' do anything past that, not even ctrl+alt+del would work.

She's also been having problems with her fan for a couple weeks, and the computer has been crashing incessantly for the past couple weeks which leads me to believe that possibly something got overheated and fried http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

If you have any clues, even if it's a rough guesstimate it would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Target]

Think you probably already answered your own question in that the problem is likely to be heat related.

Ask your friend to replace the bad fan, and see if that allows the puter to work again. Since its semi-working now, its a fair bet that its not fried....yet.

[vass0922]

The computer could be off for several hours, and just be turned on and it has problems, could it get that hot that fast?
I know a processor warms up pretty quick but that quick?

[drojman]

If you are talking about the cpu fan, then yes, it can get hot that quick. Your cpu fan needs to be going. If it is just a case fan, it should not be the problem. IN that case, I recommend making a smaller partition, test it that way. I have a 1.2 GB HD in a 133 that I had problems with it, and the drive turned out had some damaged sectors. I made a partition tht was 75% of the drive (it always crashed at about 80% completion), and it works like a charm. Worth a shot anyway... Good Luck!

[vass0922]

Hmmm sounds like a plan, however the problem is the HD is 6.4 gigs, the primary partition is 2.0 gigs (max for win95 old version) so we were just trying to make the extended partition (not the logicals) when it froze up :/
The extended partition has to be 4 gigs unless we want to waste some space (granted if it means the puter works that is a plus lol)

Thanks for the advice, I'll see what we can do http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[jbyron]

If it is the fan for the power supply.
The power supply coluld be going bad.