Rummy Posted November 12, 2012 Posted November 12, 2012 Hi, so, I have two seperate issues but thought I'd post one thread. Number 1: Just bought a used pc for like £100, decided to have a poke inside(see how dusty it was and just have a look around, I don't dabble inside much cos I'm too worried about breaking shit) and lo and behold...I slightly broke shit. It was actually really quite dusty inside, especially one of the heatsinks - however not really realising what I was doing I removed the heatsink from the CPU. Here my question is simple, do I/should I need to repaste it? At first it was overheating quite quickly, so as I'd done it once I took the heatsink off and put it back on again, hoping it would be tighter fit. This time it seemed to be, and Speccy reports a CPU temp of 40c whilst the BIOS menu reports roughly 51c. Should I go to the trouble of cleaning it and repasting it, even if it's not causing problems? This is mostly going to be a secondary PC, essentially hooked up to a TV for watching stuff intermittently(i.e internetting on TV, watching stuff, streaming from other PCs in house). I also tried to find if this was a bad temperature but mostly found max temps rather than ranges or average - it's apparently a pentium D 2.80GHz. Speecy said it was 'ok'. Number 2: Windows reports a failing hard drive every time it boots, suggesting a data backup. The lady said this was for some silly reason which I highly doubted, but I just nodded and said yes ok anyway. On further investigation(read as failing to get what I find useful S.M.A.R.T information actually within windows) I discovered it's due to a high reallocated sector count. Something around 1800-2000 I think? How bad is this? I got the information from a linux boot(in this too it informed me itself that the drive was reporting problems, and the thingy showed IMMINENT FAILURE ABORT ABORT WOOOOOO WOOOO BACKUP DATA BACKUP BACKUP, so it seems it might be quite serious? Admittedly I added everything after the IMMINENT FAILURE bit, but still it seemed to be taking shit fairly seriously - although I didn't see/experience much problem whilst doing some very basic stuff on the comp(just browsing really, not too HDD intense). How bad is this, how likely is it to fail? Is there *any* sort of fix? What is it really trying to tell me is wrong with the drive? From what I saw of the connectors, it's an IDE/PATA drive from I can tell(pins not a cardish type). As a complete aside - I think it's highly unlikely it does, but is there any way to be able to tell if the motherboard supports SATA drives? Many thanks for any help in advance.
MoogleViper Posted November 12, 2012 Posted November 12, 2012 1. Ideally you should. When you remove it the paste creates pockets of air which can reduce the ability to transfer heat. Don't know about 2. As for the SATA question, surely just look whether the mobo has a SATA connection?
Rummy Posted November 12, 2012 Author Posted November 12, 2012 As for the SATA question, surely just look whether the mobo has a SATA connection? I did think it would be as simple as that, but tbh I know very little of the insides of computers ie motherboards! Will it just have it written as SATA in white around a port? I don't know quite how to recognise SATA ports. Also, why is it that the cables for the drives have a connector halfway through like? Almost as if it could connect to another drive too, but...wouldn't that just not work?
MoogleViper Posted November 12, 2012 Posted November 12, 2012 It should have it written next to it, but if not then they should look like one of these. I'm not sure what you mean by the cables. Do you mean for the hard drives? Do you have a picture of it?
Rummy Posted November 12, 2012 Author Posted November 12, 2012 Ah, yeah I don't think I have SATA then. Not to worry about the cables, I think it's a thing to do with slaves and masters, on looking a bit further into it - it's an IDE thing it seems.
Sheikah Posted November 12, 2012 Posted November 12, 2012 Yeah IDE is likely if its slightly old. IDE ports are wide.
Rummy Posted November 12, 2012 Author Posted November 12, 2012 Pretty sure it's IDE, though the lady said it wasn't all *that* old and I recall having SATA in my laptop which I got back in like 2006/2007! Seems strange PC wouldn't be keeping up, but as I said I know little about it all. I might have a look at those IDE to SATA converter things and maybe put a SATA drive in there, or figure out a way to put a 2.5 in there, need to sort all my data out between drives really. Is it quite likely the current IDE drive will totally fail or is there a possible exception to the reallocated sector count being that major?
Shorty Posted November 13, 2012 Posted November 13, 2012 On my Gigabyte motherboard, the Sata ports point off to the side in the bottom right. Did you format the Hard Drive before you used it? It might not be a hardware problem so formatting it might solve it, doesn't meant the HDD is doomed.
MoogleViper Posted November 13, 2012 Posted November 13, 2012 Yeah IDE is likely if its slightly old. IDE ports are wide. Yeah, IDE ports look like the yellow one in the first picture I posted, and the green one in the second picture.
Rummy Posted November 13, 2012 Author Posted November 13, 2012 On my Gigabyte motherboard, the Sata ports point off to the side in the bottom right. Did you format the Hard Drive before you used it? It might not be a hardware problem so formatting it might solve it, doesn't meant the HDD is doomed. Ah, no I haven't, as she had pre/re-installed win 7 pro on it. It's a fresh enough install really, so I haven't thought about reformatting or anything. I might just try to keep an eye on the count from the S.M.A.R.T data and see if it goes up at all?
MoogleViper Posted November 13, 2012 Posted November 13, 2012 Why have you bought a cheap/old PC anyway?
Rummy Posted November 13, 2012 Author Posted November 13, 2012 Tis mostly going to be a secondary PC, essentially hooked up to a TV for watching stuff intermittently(i.e internetting on TV, watching stuff, streaming from other PCs in house). Sometimes I have people round, sometimes the ps3/360 suck at watching stuff and internetting. Plus it was cheap. I'm not entirely sure quite how old it is, considering it has a 2.80GHz Pentium D, but I was surprised by it having PATA interface instead of SATA. Given it's unlikely to be used too much/too often, I was thinking if it's running fine atm then the heatsink won't matter all that much really.
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