bykfiend42
New Member
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2012
- Messages
- 6
I just picked up an XPS D233 locally. It had two hard drives and one was bad (Western Digital). Someone tried to install XP on the good drive and it wasn't booting and the XP install disc didn't seem to want to recover it. That's fine so I installed Windows 98 SE and the Intel chipset drivers for a 440LX. It has an onboard YMF721 and a S3 Virge GX 4MB so I let windows install the drivers for them. When I installed and ran Baldur's Gate the opening logos ran great but the menu and character creation music was intermittent. When I got into the starting town there is no sound at all. If I click somewhere the character says "What now I wonder?", etc. and you can hear the ambient sounds only when the speech is going and then silence. I figured maybe it was an issue with the cd-rom so I used PowerISO to rip the cd and mounted the image through Daemon tools but got the same issues. Then I installed King's Quest 7 Win98/DOS version and its sound is intermittent too. I figured bad onboard sound, so I installed an AWE32, same thing. I ran a thorough scandisk on the drive and it found bad sectors. I'm not sure if it said 3000 bad sectors or 3k in bad sectors. Then I ran sfc.exe in case system files were somehow Swiss cheesed by bad sectors and nothing really came up corrupt. Everything still has the same issue. I booted of a MemTest86 disc and it didn't find memory errors. My next step would probably be to uninstall re-install Baldur's Gate since the bad sectors weren't identified when I installed it, then uninstall and re-install Windows 98 if that doesnt work. Could this be a drive error or is there something else going on? I know Dell is known for having support for computers back to the stone age but the support for the D233 and M200s are next to nothing. The D233 doesn't even have a manual up. Any thoughts? I forgot to mention the Dell D233 is a 233MHz Pentium II system with 64MB of ram currently. The hard drive is a 6GB IBM and the BIOS is the latest A09 version.