Hi Everyone,
I posted a continuous booting problem on 25 Sep. I have more information and I thought it best to open a new thread. This is in a Gateway FLEXATXSTC BRO 300S. It's got a 1 GHz Celeron and a Maxtor D540x-4K 20Gig harddrive. The owner (friend) was loading games the day before the problem occurred. Her son shut the computer down normally. When my friend turned it back on, it was continuously booting. So here is what I have done so far:
I went into the bios turned off all the checks being bypassed (wanted the motherboard to perform all checks). When i rebooted, it stops immediately after the Gateway screen disappears (at the beginning) with the following message "Windows NT has found only 447K of low memory. 512K of low memory is required to run Windows NT. You may need to upgrade your computer or run a configuration program provided by the manufacturer." OK, so far so bad.
I have done the following: (1) Downloaded the latest Powermax harddrive diagnostic from Maxtor and run it on the Gateway...the harddrive passes all tests with flying colors.
(2)Put the drive in my Windows ME machine and tried to do a virus check with the latest Norton (old program with latest virus definitions) and got an error message along the lines of "a utility program is blocking access to this drive". I could not check for viruses. The drive is 100% NTFS by the way. Windows ME doesn't recognize the partition. (3) Tried two other hard drives hooked to the same ribbon cable and power connector in the Gateway. Both harddrives booted without a hitch. One only boots to a c: prompt while the other boots in Windows 98 SE. (4) I booted with a floppy drive...no problem. My first two inclinations were (a) Virus and (b) a screwed up software problem from the games. But, that doesn't answer the possible hardware problem if the error message is legitimate. So, I did a (5) I took the memory stick out of my good Windows ME computer and put it in the Gateway. Same problem shows up. I get the same error message about the memory.
So, I'm at a loss. I don't want to wipe the drive and write all 0's (low-level format option on Maxtor Diagnostics disk) unless there is something to gain. If it's a virus, that may not solve the problem. If it's a hardware problem with the cache on the harddrive, why isn't the diagnostic finding it? I can take the drive all the way down but I really hate to lose everything on it. I don't have a windows XP machine with a virus checker to run on this harddrive. Suggestions?
Thanks,
oldbear
I posted a continuous booting problem on 25 Sep. I have more information and I thought it best to open a new thread. This is in a Gateway FLEXATXSTC BRO 300S. It's got a 1 GHz Celeron and a Maxtor D540x-4K 20Gig harddrive. The owner (friend) was loading games the day before the problem occurred. Her son shut the computer down normally. When my friend turned it back on, it was continuously booting. So here is what I have done so far:
I went into the bios turned off all the checks being bypassed (wanted the motherboard to perform all checks). When i rebooted, it stops immediately after the Gateway screen disappears (at the beginning) with the following message "Windows NT has found only 447K of low memory. 512K of low memory is required to run Windows NT. You may need to upgrade your computer or run a configuration program provided by the manufacturer." OK, so far so bad.
I have done the following: (1) Downloaded the latest Powermax harddrive diagnostic from Maxtor and run it on the Gateway...the harddrive passes all tests with flying colors.
(2)Put the drive in my Windows ME machine and tried to do a virus check with the latest Norton (old program with latest virus definitions) and got an error message along the lines of "a utility program is blocking access to this drive". I could not check for viruses. The drive is 100% NTFS by the way. Windows ME doesn't recognize the partition. (3) Tried two other hard drives hooked to the same ribbon cable and power connector in the Gateway. Both harddrives booted without a hitch. One only boots to a c: prompt while the other boots in Windows 98 SE. (4) I booted with a floppy drive...no problem. My first two inclinations were (a) Virus and (b) a screwed up software problem from the games. But, that doesn't answer the possible hardware problem if the error message is legitimate. So, I did a (5) I took the memory stick out of my good Windows ME computer and put it in the Gateway. Same problem shows up. I get the same error message about the memory.
So, I'm at a loss. I don't want to wipe the drive and write all 0's (low-level format option on Maxtor Diagnostics disk) unless there is something to gain. If it's a virus, that may not solve the problem. If it's a hardware problem with the cache on the harddrive, why isn't the diagnostic finding it? I can take the drive all the way down but I really hate to lose everything on it. I don't have a windows XP machine with a virus checker to run on this harddrive. Suggestions?
Thanks,
oldbear
