Re: My PC just broke down.... :(

On 2005-08-14 04:02:49 -0500, Sandman <mr@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

No, not the new Dell laptop, but my older gaming desktop PC. I ran a 3D benchmark test and the PC crashed. The PC crashing isn't very odd, it does that a lot, but now it won't boot!

That's stupid, Sandman. It should never crash. If it does, you should take a few minutes and find out why - say, get someone to analyze the memory dump the bluescreen made. 15 minutes later, you can know exactly why it crashed.


So, after the BIOS post, in which I see that the HD's S.M.A.R.T status is ok, it just dies. One out of five times, it makes it to the "proogress bar" you see *before* the "loading windows XP" progress bar, i.e. the ugly bar that spans the entire bottom part of the screen (don't know if this is driven by the BIOS or Windows), but only manages to load some five or six "ticks" before dying.

By "dies" after smart, you mean it hangs? What happens on the screen 4 of 5 times?

If it did the 1/5 action 5/5 times, I'd say you've got a service problem, but since that's not what happens, I've a different suggestion (see below).


So, now what? If it were a Mac, I would have popped in the installation CD and run Disk Utility on the drive. Running the installation disk (WXP Pro Corporate SP1 - SP2 is installed) let's me launch "Windows automatic recovery", which asks for a *FLOPPY* named Windows Automatic Recovery. I don't have a floppy drive on my PC. That's absurd.

ASR requires that you already have an ASR backup, so obviously that won't help you a bit, because you don't have one. (do you just randomly press buttons hoping something will happen?)


Once the installation program is loaded, it has an option to recover a windows installation, and when I choose that, all that happens is that I am being logged on to the current windows installation in shell mode. WTF? What am I supposed to do after that? 

See above.


However, Using this, I -am- able to log in to Windows (albeit only through a command shell), so I am assuming that the hard drive is quite fine since I can browse and see files on it. Could it be something like the master boot record that got screwed up? I don't know. How do I fix it if it is?

I suggest chkdsk -p for now, that will let us know if your disk filesystem has a problem. Keep running it until no errors are reported.


Do I have to go out and actually buy a piece of software to fix my Windows hard drive - or to even SEE if it's the HD that is at fault?

Where did this come from? You can simply type "HELP" in the recovery console and see all the commands - surely someone as smart as you, and as familiar with Unix as you, would know that CHKDSK will check the disks for any issues? All it took was trying to type various things - ? and HELP - in the console to see all the commands.

You shouldn't even need to ask for help - you should have already been able to fix this. I'm actually a bit disappointed in you.

.

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