Huh? You just point the installation CD to the same drive your system is on. It will ask: "There is a Windows installation on this drive, blah blah, continue anyway?" Do so. That's it.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
In some cases, you don't want to overwrite the data without deleting first, because that data can be corrupted in some way, like viruses, bad sectors, etc. Reinstalling your OS on a non-clean partition is prone to risk, especially as it becomes necessary in very bad cases.
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
hahah... you talk like computer viruses were living things, and we needed a "format c:"to treat the sick system. Computer viruses
are like real life viruses: if left alone they're just plain useless... they need a certain environment in order to function. Well, all viruses need to make sure they are always running, so they'll either disguise themselves as an important program, or bind themselves to some system file or even install a driver and hide their files and registry entries (making it impossible to the average antivirus to remove it). In any case, the bad files will be anywhere but in your documents or your desktop. Well, there are the awful alternate data streams... but that doesn't happen that often.
Anyway, my HD now has 2 years without being formatted.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
In all honesty, I have never once been able to point the XP installation disc to drive C and tell it to reinstall WITHOUT it wiping the entire partition. This is why I gave Windows its own partition. It still wipes the entire partition on reinstall whether I ask it to or not, to this day. It will simply greet me with, "performing this action will erase all data. Do you wish to continue?" and opting out exits installation.
A CS geek friend said I was full of shit, so I tossed him the CD and directed him to my tower. After messing with every option in the menu, he was unsuccessful at coaxing XP to reinstall without wiping the entire partition.
It was probably based on what you were trying to install. Sure it wasn't a "Recovery Disk"?
Because I know for damned sure that when I reinstalled Windows XP onto my other machine, it didn't wipe the partition.
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
I don't know what's wrong, but here are some things you *could* try. Run a memory test. There's a program called Memtest86 which you burn on a CD and boot from it. (you might even already have it on that Linux liveCD you got)
Try fiddling with the Windows Paging File Size thingamajig. It's supposedly best to set it at 2 times the amount of RAM you have. So if you have 1 GB of RAM, set it to 2 GB (both minimum and maximum size so it doesn't keep changing its size).
Okay, that's all I got. If this doesn't work, and you already ran all the standard adware, spyware and virus scans, then all I can say is nuke the hard drive and re-install the entire OS. If *that* doesn't work, well, see below.
Highness wrote:
* Booted linux from a live CD, mounted the same hard drive/partitions, and played music from them without any issues at all.
On the other hand, it seems to me like you already found a solution. :)
Just a quick note: being able to boot a Linux Live CD without no problems does not rule out hardware failure. I have fixed one laptop (battery malfunction) and one desktop (harddisk failure) both of which showed problems on XP but worked flawlessly with an Ubuntu Live CD (the latter wouldn't even boot in XP anymore, but lasted until the harddrive died in Linux, which was much more than enough to back up everything without data loss).
With that in mind, I have a few suggestions:
1) If it is a virus, malware or some form of spyware, any testing done while XP is running is compromised and may give false results; it would be ideal to test it with XP offline. One way to do it is to use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows to boot and scan your computer. It requires a XP CD, which it uses to build a preinstalled environment with a variety of virus/malware scanners which you can boot to. Just to be safe, you will want to make the CD in another computer.
2) Sysinternals has a lot of cool utilities, two of which deserve special mention:
(a) Process Explorer. There are some forms of CPU usage that don't show up in standard Task Manager; in particular, telling Process Explorer to show the "Context Switch Delta" column and watching the "DPCs" metaprocess can give a clue to hardware malfunctions that can slow the computer down without showing up elsewhere (the laptop I mentioned had a problem with the battery that manifested in this way);
(b) Rootkit Revealer. The way it is designed to work makes it virtually impossible for any rootkit to hide/compromise the program -- the rootkit programmers would have to know a lot more about the inner workings of the NT kernel than they care about.
Rootkit Revealer. The way it is designed to work makes it virtually impossible for any rootkit to hide/compromise the program -- the rootkit programmers would have to know a lot more about the inner workings of the NT kernel than they care about.
I don't much trust Rootkit detecting software running within a compromised OS. Despite claims by the author that it's improbable that the rootkit author will need to have "an intimate knowledge of the NTFS, FAT and Registry hive formats," that knowledge is actually required to write the rootkit detector, so... that knowledge is out there. It's not trivial by any stretch, but it's not purely in the realm of theory as the author claims.
EDIT: I'm not saying that RR is bad software, far from it, I love it, but don't take it as gospel. When in doubt use a inside the box/outside the box approach.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Thanks for the input. But services should be able to run without the sound going crazy. The CPU is still at a low usage.
The power toys are always fun to use though.
Xkeeper wrote:
What are you using to test?
Winamp? Windows Media? It's odd that you check all of what you did without actually checking the player's configuration.
arflech's suggestion doesn't even make any sense -- even with the most services possible open, audio output wouldn't lag like that, especially if CPU usage is not 100%.
I have tried different players, and it doesn't matter at all. Windows media player, VLC, Winamp, Youtube, and even the log off or login sound in windows it self lags like crazy.
Raiscan wrote:
Have you tried chipset/motherboard drivers?
Yes
moozooh wrote:
Last time I had a problem like this it was due to some hardware conflict initiated by my sound card. Although with some luck, I expect the same problem to be solved by installing proper drivers after uninstalling the not-so-proper.
Did that too. Not any luck though. :(
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
Weird... did yot try booting in safe mode?
If antiviruses aren't finding anything, I'd recommend RegRun Security Suite. It will do a boot time scan listing all the auto-boot services, the registry entry and their
location on the hard drive. It can also warn you about potentialy dangerous stuff. What you remove will go to the blacklist, what you accept will go to the ignore list.
This is it, just try to find some weird service with a file named like a system file,
or a random name or a service running from the TMP folder.
Anyway, this may not work if the thing infected any system file...
But, hey... you seem to be another victim of the HD FORMATTING SYNDROME. That's dangerous, dude. Some people end up thinking they are computers and there are millions of invisible viruses around them and end up formatting themselves (suicide).
I reinstall Windows like this: (I usually take the HD to another PC so I can freely delete stuff. If that's not possible, I use a PE [Pre-installed Enviromment] Windows)
I delete the folders: PROGRAM FILES, WINDOWS and everything inside DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS backing up the users' DESKTOP and MY DOCUMENTS.
I also delete everything scattered in the C: drive. You need to delete the SYSTEM VOLUME INFORMATION folder, but it has some NTFS PERMISSIONS set, so you'll need to take ownership (in FOLDER OPTIONS, disable SIMPLE FILE SHARING, then go to the properties of the folder, security tab, advanced, ownership.
I did not try to boot it in safe mode, but I did however run some reg scans, and auto starting program check.
Your way of deleting stuff seems very time consuming, and not really a good way either if you ask me. I like to format the HD, and it's not that big of an issue. Just tedious to backup important stuff, such as settings, and various files.
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Sounds like your disk is in PIO mode. To confirm if it is open up devmgmt.msc, go to IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and open up the property sheet for Primary IDE Controller and go to advanced, if you see PIO then you have this problem. If you do post back and I'll dig up how to fix it.
EDIT:
from Microsoft KB
Follow these steps, and then quit Registry Editor:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0001
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess, and then press ENTER.
5. On the Edit menu, click Modify.
6. Type 1, and then click OK.
Follow these steps, and then quit Registry Editor:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0002
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess, and then press ENTER.
5. On the Edit menu, click Modify.
6. Type 1, and then click OK.
You'll need to reboot after this is done, and obviously ensure that the transfer rate is set to "DMA if available"
I did never check the PIO thing. I did however check that DMA thing. I will have to verify this when I'm back in Germany in December. Thanks for this input. Will be cool to see if it works. Wonder though why the this would occur all of a sudden?
Rick wrote:
Out of curiousity, would any of these be applicable to Vista as well? I'm not having any resource-hogging problems, but I'd love to prevent them from happening.
My suggestion is to never fix an error that you don't have. ;)
Speed tweaks are never that much improving the system though. Only slightly perhaps? And the fact is that tweaking is so fun that I always tend to break stuff from tweaking until it breaks. ;)
superjupi wrote:
In all honesty, I have never once been able to point the XP installation disc to drive C and tell it to reinstall WITHOUT it wiping the entire partition. This is why I gave Windows its own partition. It still wipes the entire partition on reinstall whether I ask it to or not, to this day. It will simply greet me with, "performing this action will erase all data. Do you wish to continue?" and opting out exits installation.
A CS geek friend said I was full of shit, so I tossed him the CD and directed him to my tower. After messing with every option in the menu, he was unsuccessful at coaxing XP to reinstall without wiping the entire partition.
Hahaha! A "CS geek" tried to fix your computer? No wonder you never saw the option to continue without blasting your files away. The option to just overwrite the system is indeed available. ;)
Sorry for the slight flame there, can't help my self. CS-geeks never made anything good around me. :)
Blublu wrote:
I don't know what's wrong, but here are some things you *could* try. Run a memory test. There's a program called Memtest86 which you burn on a CD and boot from it. (you might even already have it on that Linux liveCD you got)
Try fiddling with the Windows Paging File Size thingamajig. It's supposedly best to set it at 2 times the amount of RAM you have. So if you have 1 GB of RAM, set it to 2 GB (both minimum and maximum size so it doesn't keep changing its size).
Okay, that's all I got. If this doesn't work, and you already ran all the standard adware, spyware and virus scans, then all I can say is nuke the hard drive and re-install the entire OS. If *that* doesn't work, well, see below.
Highness wrote:
* Booted linux from a live CD, mounted the same hard drive/partitions, and played music from them without any issues at all.
On the other hand, it seems to me like you already found a solution. :)
I have not scanned the ram with Memtest86, but would that really be the problem then? I mean... The RAM is used when booting the liveCD too.
And of course... How much I desire to install Linux on her computer, there is always the question "Ehh.. What is this, and how do I use it?"
Some times it went totally fine when I did install it on friends computers. Hardly had no problems at all. But then again... She lives 1280Km from my apartment, so it's not just around the corner. Would be worse to go over there in case of the system not booting at all.
Reformat and re-install windows xp is what I am going to do. But first I will test the other suggestions, just for the fun of it.
marzojr wrote:
Just a quick note: being able to boot a Linux Live CD without no problems does not rule out hardware failure. I have fixed one laptop (battery malfunction) and one desktop (harddisk failure) both of which showed problems on XP but worked flawlessly with an Ubuntu Live CD (the latter wouldn't even boot in XP anymore, but lasted until the harddrive died in Linux, which was much more than enough to back up everything without data loss).
With that in mind, I have a few suggestions:
1) If it is a virus, malware or some form of spyware, any testing done while XP is running is compromised and may give false results; it would be ideal to test it with XP offline. One way to do it is to use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows to boot and scan your computer. It requires a XP CD, which it uses to build a preinstalled environment with a variety of virus/malware scanners which you can boot to. Just to be safe, you will want to make the CD in another computer.
2) Sysinternals has a lot of cool utilities, two of which deserve special mention:
(a) Process Explorer. There are some forms of CPU usage that don't show up in standard Task Manager; in particular, telling Process Explorer to show the "Context Switch Delta" column and watching the "DPCs" metaprocess can give a clue to hardware malfunctions that can slow the computer down without showing up elsewhere (the laptop I mentioned had a problem with the battery that manifested in this way);
(b) Rootkit Revealer. The way it is designed to work makes it virtually impossible for any rootkit to hide/compromise the program -- the rootkit programmers would have to know a lot more about the inner workings of the NT kernel than they care about.
Point taken. Might get around to try this. Cheers.
I would like to take the moment to thank you all for the attention in this thread. Really helpful and nice suggestions.
If you have any more of them, keep em' posted.
Thanks so far.
Sounds like your disk is in PIO mode. To confirm if it is open up devmgmt.msc, go to IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and open up the property sheet for Primary IDE Controller and go to advanced, if you see PIO then you have this problem. If you do post back and I'll dig up how to fix it.
EDIT:
from Microsoft KB
Follow these steps, and then quit Registry Editor:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0001
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess, and then press ENTER.
5. On the Edit menu, click Modify.
6. Type 1, and then click OK.
Follow these steps, and then quit Registry Editor:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0002
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess, and then press ENTER.
5. On the Edit menu, click Modify.
6. Type 1, and then click OK.
You'll need to reboot after this is done, and obviously ensure that the transfer rate is set to "DMA if available"
I did never check the PIO thing. I did however check that DMA thing. I will have to verify this when I'm back in Germany in December. Thanks for this input. Will be cool to see if it works. Wonder though why the this would occur all of a sudden?
Under default settings this occurs whenever you have 6 consecutive read failures. On laptops it's common especially when people drum on the wrist rests while waiting for something to load from the hard drive.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Under default settings this occurs whenever you have 6 consecutive read failures. On laptops it's common especially when people drum on the wrist rests while waiting for something to load from the hard drive.
And if it starts happening more frequently than "once, inexplicably", then it's time to get another hard drive and back everything up :)
Under default settings this occurs whenever you have 6 consecutive read failures. On laptops it's common especially when people drum on the wrist rests while waiting for something to load from the hard drive.
And if it starts happening more frequently than "once, inexplicably", then it's time to get another hard drive and back everything up :)
Well, the registry patch I threw up there resets the PIO vs DMA whenever a read is successful. So this actually effectively disables this "warning."
For good or for ill.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Well, it's fine if you have something else like HDD Health.
Actually, I recommend installing that regardless. It gives a good indicator of how badly your HDD is doing :P
(Unfortunately, it's a bit late for a few of my drives...)
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Joined: 4/8/2005
Posts: 1573
Location: Gone for a year, just for varietyyyyyyyyy!!
Xkeeper wrote:
Well, it's fine if you have something else like HDD Health.
Actually, I recommend installing that regardless. It gives a good indicator of how badly your HDD is doing :P
Thank you for the link, Xkeeper.
I just tested running the program and it said that the drive health is critical: 27%. I don't quite understand what that means, though. :)
Well, it's fine if you have something else like HDD Health.
Actually, I recommend installing that regardless. It gives a good indicator of how badly your HDD is doing :P
Thank you for the link, Xkeeper.
I just tested running the program and it said that the drive health is critical: 27%. I don't quite understand what that means, though. :)
your drive has self reporting mechanisms in place to let your computer know when it's about to fail, if your hard drive is reporting trouble get your data backed up ASAP.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
