well i dusted everything and now its running about 38-39*C (big jump). of course that comes with the trade off that after i plugged everything back in the computer booted once no problems, then locked up. when i rebootedd it, it decided my hard drive was missing, then i unplugged it and replugged the power and IDE. suddenly my NTFS partition is corrupt and wont boot windows. i try everything i can think of (windows recovery console, partition managers, linux install cds, linux live cds) everything says the partition is corrupt. then i go and download Hiren's boot CD to try and recover some of it. I when i boot up i dont put the CD in fast enough and lo and behold.. suddenly i boot into a perfectly funtional windows XP. I SWEAR MY COMPUTER IS PART OF AN EVIL PLOT BY M$ TO TORTURE ME. as soon as i get the time this computer is headed right back to Gentoo. In the mean time it looks like problem solved.

(Also: i managed to almost get frostbite too :giddy: )

Sounds like you disturbed something during the cleaning process lol.

Anyway I`m glad you got it all sorted.

Regards Howard

well... it seems my computer had a relapse of sort. about two hours after i posted the message, it locked up again and upon restart would not boot to windows.
After som use of H'sBCD6 i managed to get it to boot again, albeit very slowly (last trial 1min 53 secnds, but before that 3 minutes 17 seconds from POST results to useable desktop).

Every time windows runs now it goes immideatly to light-blue screen CHKDSK which reports several sectors (if u want the numbers ask and ill reboot) as unreadable, and the first time it ran it recovered many orphaned files including atapi.sys (which would seem rather important). If i allow CHKDSK to run it hangs after completing step 3 of 3 (security something verification i think). If i skip it (like i did on my time trials) everything boots, but runs rather slowly.

what can i do to fix the apparently corrupt NTFS system (other than reformatting)?

(i realize this is really a different question then that of the thread but it is related so i didnt want to create another one)

I don`t think there`s much you can do other than a reformat.

I`m not sure if doing a repair install would help in this situation, but I guess its worth a try. Look here for instructions on how to do a repair install.

Regards Howard :suspiciou

Your HDD is bad or going bad

It sounds like your hard drive is bad. Do you have SMART enabled in the BIOS?