[nerdmeier]

My olde hard drive was giving indications of failing - noisy, occasional (daily) lock-ups w/ the drive light on. I bought a new drive, transfered everything, made the new drive the primary (and only) drive in the system and everything worked great for about one week. Turned on the computer one morning and the screen was in 640 x 480 mode with NO mouse.

Booted to safe mode and everything worked fine - installed a new graphics card with it's drivers and system continued to boot to 640 x 480.

I reinstalled the old hard drive and the system works fine with 1024 x 768 screen but locks-up with the drive light on randomly during the day. Have run f-secure - nothing found. Ad-Aware - nothing major found. Spybot S&E - nothing major found. TrojanHunter - nothing found.

Installed new drive as slave and re-ran above tests with no malware found on any of my drives.

I reinstalled new drive as only drive and rebooted.

Used device manager to remove mouse driver and rebooted - system reinstalled mouse driver and now I have mouse back.

Downloaded and installed new graphics driver from Gateway - no change
Downloaded and installed even newer graphics driver from nVidia - no change

System works fine in safe mode and on old drive (with annoying lock-ups) but with new drive in place it will not let me change screen settings.

[B]

Edited by nerdmeier, 30 September 2005 - 05:44 PM.

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Go into Run in the start menu and type in msconfig. You will see some check boxes. Uncheck one and restart. If it doesnt change anything (or makes it worse) recheck it and uncheck the next one and restart. If it changes anything go to its tab in msconfig and do the same in here to find out what folder is wrong

[Saigon]

Go into Run in the start menu and type in msconfig. You will see some check boxes. Uncheck one and restart. If it doesnt change anything (or makes it worse) recheck it and uncheck the next one and restart. If it changes anything go to its tab in msconfig and do the same in here to find out what folder is wrong

[nerdmeier]

I unchecked the boxes one at a time as suggested - no changes. I then unchecked all the boxes - no improvement. I should add that after each step I attempted to change the screen settings - no changes.

There MUST be some info that's loading from the new drive that is different from the old drive but I'll be damned if I can figure out where it is!

[nerdmeier]

Following Saigon's suggestions (thanks Saigon) I noticed that my system.ini file was not lookin' too normal on the new drive. I was in the unique position to copy the system.ini file from my old hard drive to a network hard drive and renamed it system.old. I then switched the cabling back to the new drive and managed to delete the system.ini file on the new drive, copy the file from the network drive to the new drive, renamed it system.ini, and rebooted - VIOLA! the screen was back to normal - with the added benefit of the new nVidia driver which improves my screen appearance greatly!

One downside - I'm back to having intermittent lock-ups which are apparently tied to the system.ini instructions - back to the search!

UPDATE!
Turns out my CD burner was crapping out causing the intermittent lock-ups. Unplugged it and haven't had an issue for 3 days now. I noticed it wasn't always available in windows explorer and heard a click from the drive area on occasion - followed by poor performance and a lock-up - musta been the OS looking to communicate with the drive and not getting the proper answer. That doesn't explain my system.ini file getting jacked-up but since I replaced the system.ini I'm back to being in contol of my mouse and screen.

Edited by nerdmeier, 05 October 2005 - 04:12 PM.