i have an old windows 98 computer in my music studio, which has all i need for controling my multi track recording decks and for doing final mixing down and creating cd's and mp3s. it was taking about half an hour for the computer to load windows. and another 10 minutes for the start menu to come up. sound forge would load slowly but i could not open any files.
all my data files are on a 'd' drive, so i was not worried about loosing all my work but to re-configure another computer to do what this one does would take much money and weeks of work. no virus, this machine is not on the internet and i never take any media from anyone. i never do upgrades and did not add any new software or drivers. maybe a hardware problem. i removed all running programs from the task manager except explorer, window-eyes and systray, these are escential to keep running. and made sure to get any extra programs out of the system start up. this feature is buryed under the system configuration. i also did a registery check. same trouble. i pulled out every card except the video and sound cards. same. i swapped out the memory for some different ones. no good. i re-seated the cpu and all the cables. i was now pretty sure my hard drive was failing. i got an external speech synthesizer, old boot floppy disk with format.com, fdisk, scandisk, xcopy and dos speech software on it and started the machine and ran my dos speech software. then did the below scandisk scandisk /surface /autofix /nosave scandisk started copying over the bad sectors right away. it ran for 24 hours and was only 15 percent done. i decided to stop it. i got another hard drive from a known good computer and connected it to the wires from my second cd drive, and copyed it's contents to my 'd' data drive. then i reformated it to be a bootable drive format e:/s i then wanted to use xcopy to take an exact copy of my failing drive, but i could not do that in native dos because it would not preserve the long file names, so i had to hope the failing drive had one more start up in it i removed the floppy and powered up. again it took about half an hour to fully load and i went to dos mode under windows and typed in xcopy c:*.* e: /h /i /c /k /e /r /y /s copying started at a pretty good pace, but after about 9 hours copy failures started to come on each file and then the whir of the drive stopped completely. about 75 percent of the drive copied over, but it seemed that all the windows system and program files made it over. i changed the jumper on the new drive from slave to master and connected it to the wires from the failed one. i pushed the floppy back in and powered up. i thought it would not make it past the cmos and i would have to get someone to read the screen and reset them, but it was recognized as my primary master. lucky break. i ran fdisk from the floppy and set the active partition on the new drive. exited fdisk, took out the floppy and re-booted. i was amazed when the drive read right away and started windows and is just fine. the computer now is exactly the same as it was, except it is much much faster. i guess the old drive had been slowly failing for many weeks. older computers are much more accesssible, just like older cars can be fixed.
