computer gurus please read ~

ok, as some of you know, my hard drive crashed a couple of months ago.
i got a message called "insurmountable boot drive," and it was
determined that my OS was unable to boot due to something wrong with
the hard drive. the solution would be to get a new hard drive. supposedly,
i should be able to slave the old hard drive and retrieve the data from it,
then either toss it away or isolate the bad sectors and use the rest for
storage, whichever applies.

so i got a seagate 80gb hard drive and installed it per directions. i set the
jumper on the new hard drive to master and set the jumper on the old
hard drive (a western digital 30gb) to slave. i hooked up the cable from
the new hard drive to the
motherboard and both hard drives as instructed, and turned on the
computer.

the computer froze and stuck on "checking NVRAM." i figured there might
be a problem with the RAM, so i pulled both chips, which are PC 133
16x64 chips. i noticed quite a bit of dust around the base of them so, i
cleaned them off and blew out the socket that they plug into. then, i must
have re-installed them incorrectly, because of what happened next. i
turned the computer on and nothing came up on the screen. the
comptuer was on for a few seconds when i was horrified to smell that
lovely baking silicone smell that we all dread. i immediately shut
everything down and pulled the chips.

one of them was pretty hot. i inspected the gold connectors and noticed
that one connector seems to be blacked out. ok, so i apparently burned a
ramchip out. the other one seems fine. i put them both back in (correctly
this time) and turned on the comptuer, hoping for a miracle, but it
eremained stuck on "checking NVRAM."

so, from what i can see, i need to replace the ramchip, and this should be
the end of the problem.

based on that, can anyone offer anything else? if i replace the chip,
should everything else be fine? does it sound like i installed the hard
drives correctly, or should i forget the old hard drive and jsut install the
new one and find another way to get the data off the old? are there any
other reasons it would have been stuck on "checking NVRAM" before i
apparently burned out the ram chip? how much am i going to end up
paying for a damn ram chip, anyway?

anything i might have left out?



Edited by TasunkaWitko

When I transferred data, I used a microdrive, and did it that way. Wally World has some that are about 4G, for around $30. It may take a couple downloads, but no big deal. I consolidated all my files into single folders, and was able to do it all in one shot, including a couple thousand songs, and probably 10,000 photos, so there was a lot to transfer.

Ron, sorry I am not that advanced to diagnose this.I agree with Waksupi in his data transfer method.Very painless.Rob, me too, the  16 pound sledge usually fixes my hard drive problems,,,

4 KB of bad sectors on a 30 GB HD is well below new drive specs.  4 NANO particles would do that.  Sounds like the drive is good.  You got too much space now.........go back to the store and see if you can trade 25 GB for a Savage in 338-08!

BEAR

Bear, & Tas,

If you guys find anyone to take you up on that trade, let me and Tex know, we've got enough to barter for a small armory!!!!

you're probably right, tim, although i gotta admit that when i blew up the first ramchip i was pretty worried about sacrificing the other.....i think what happened is that i somehow had it installed correclt, either backwords or some other not-quite-right situation. something still must not be quite right, because the computer is saying that i ahve 240 mb ram isntead of 256.....i'm willing to live with it, though......

now that you mention it, that's exactly where my other 16mb of ram is!!

 

thanx for reminding me~~