New hard drive freezing

[JJohnson1234]

Yesterday, my brother asked me to look at his computer because he couldn't connect to the internet. I took a look and realized he had viruses and the best solution would be to reformat.

I had an extra hard drive that was larger than his so I went ahead and just installed that one instead. Now, I can connect it to the internet and everything but when I do it keeps freezing.

He has an old system that my cousin built like 8 years ago. The hard drive he had was only 20 gigs and the one I just replaced it with is 250 gb. Is there some compatibility issue that I'm not getting or something? Or could there be a virus in the RAM? I thought this would be an easy deal, but its taking me all day.

Please shed some light.

 

[tipstir]

Take out that old 20GB out..
Install the 250GB
Go into the BIOS and see if the BIOS can see the 250GB. Most likely it can't but don't worry about it. When you install a fresh copy of Windows you need to partition that 250 into either 50GB for the OS on C and D and E you need to see how large you can make the second drive if you not then you need to have D and E partition form that 250GB.
Install Windows OS XP.

 

[SNGX1275]

Virus can't be hiding in the RAM, that gets reset every time the computer is turned off. And you switched hard drives so there would be no virus issue there.

If the new drive is seen as 250 all is well, there is a chance Windows or the computer itself only sees it as 127 gigs.. That probably isn't the case because you need to go back to about 2000 before you start having those size issues.. Not likely the problem here anyway.

My first suggestion would be to update the drivers for EVERYTHING. Video card, chipset of the board, sound drivers, lan/nic drivers, pretty much everything you can think of. Also make sure your OS is up to date, perhaps you should do this before the drivers, but it shouldn't be a big issue if you don't.

Other things I can think of but are less likely:
Possible that that thing was on its last legs before the hd swap, and now the new hd pulls more power from the power supply, just enough more to cause problems.

Or perhaps the problems were already there and you just didn't notice because it was all blamed on the previous viruses, ect.

Could be the RAM too, downloading and burning (as disk image) a memtest iso will help rule that out. If it makes it through a pass without errors you can rule out frequent lockups most of the time. Several passes (more than 3) are generally wanted to completely rule out RAM issues, but if they happen frequently the RAM is going to be bad enough to fail memtest pretty quickly.

If you have a spare IDE cable lying around you may want to swap it in, suppose its possible the current IDE ribbon is bad and it just was made worse when you swapped the drives. Probably worth reseating the cable at the drive and on the motherboard anyway.