Hi,

That frigging laptop has let me down again. It was running Windows 2000 quite well, until it suddenly decided to un-MBR itself. I was going to install XP anyway, so I put my XP disc in and went to install it. Formatted the HDD, and it got half way through the DOS-side of installing XP, and it suddenly restarted.

Now, when I try and install it, it gets stuck at the very beginning of the install. At "Loading Windows Executive". I have no idea why it has suddenly started doing this.

I can't even load a Linux live CD to try and format the HDD. I got a Windows 98 boot CD to work, and fdisk'ed it, but I'm not convinced this has made any difference.

Any ideas?

(Oh, maybe I should add that about a week ago, I made a new cooling system for it as it had a puny little metal plate over the hot intel chipset. It worked perfectly, and got temps down from 102*C on the NB to about 52*C. I could even play Halo without it dying a heat-induced death!)

Ran a hard disk diagnostic on it?

Might have corrupted/damaged sectors

I'll download the Hitachi tool at school today, and try that when I get home. I hope it's not the HDD, because I've only just bought the drive for it.

BTW: It now does the Windows executive crash on every NT-based OS I have. And Vista gets about half way through the expanding files and has a weird error.

This is f*cking pissing me off now.

There's nothing wrong with the HDD according to the Hitachi drive tool, passed a memtest with ease as well.

I'm now thinking that something deeper's had a knacker, like the southbridge or something. I doubt it being the cooling, as all I did was swap a aluminium heatspreader out for a couple of old graphics card heatsinks (ATI Rage, Riva TNT2 etc) and fitted little RAM sinks onto the VRMS that required cooling.

I've also tried two different DVDROM drives, and even tried making a copy of my Windows disc to see if that was causing it, but to no avail.

I really think it's forked this time.

It sounds like a memory problem. Memtest doesn't show up refresh problems, which are actually the most common type. Can you increase the timings? Laptop BIOS usually suck so it might not be easy...

It seems to have totally given up the ghost now.

Swapped RAM around for a while until I got bored, but today it's different. No picture on the screen, fans on full rev, hdd or cdrom not powering up etc.

Looks like ebay this pile, and save up enough cash to buy an EEE PC or the likes.

Are you sure your DIY heat sinks are still working? What did you stick them on with exactly? A fritzed bridge would give the problems you describe.

The heatsinks are held down with some of that thermal double-sided tape stuff. They worked bang on (used to get hot), but this is weird.

Ah well, it's for sale on both here and Ebay. I can't be arsed with decrepit old crap any more.

lol, you talking about me or the laptop

You.

No, the laptop. I might as well buy something newer (I really want an EEE PC) and use that until it dies like this one has.

I'm confused

You swapped out the carefully designed heatpipe cooling on a laptop with some old heatsinks you stuck on with tape & now it's not working?

No, I swapped out the poorly made aluminium plate heatspreader thing that didn't even fit right (not a lot of contact on the chipset) with some heatsinks of some Video cards that I stuck on with that thermal adhesive tape stuff. This isn't on the CPU, fyi.

Which I did two weeks prior to it breaking, and it worked better than it did before. I could even play a game without it throttling and turning off.

Anyway, it's on ebay tomorrow as spares or repairs.