Dead Computer Night
I got home tonight and noticed that the hard drive light on my main system was looking... weird. like it was blinking at but at an odd duty cycle so that is looked dim.
I powered up the monitor and instead of the screen saver it simply said 'PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT'. There goes my evening.
I tried a number of different boot configurations but nothing worked. It would power up, ask if I wanted to boot into XPpro or 2000 and then prompt me with the usual apologies about not shutting down correctly and would you like to boot into safe mode. Most of the computer I see at this point won't even boot into safe mode, mine was no different.
I set it to not reboot on an error in hope that I'd spot something useful. I was rewarded by a nice BSOD stating that the boot drive was unmountable. Well what the hell had I been working off from so far?
Time for the recovery CD. It would have been nice to have had this happen to a system with a CD drive in it but that went away long ago in order to hold more hard drives.
Good thing my Debian Linux box is sitting on a shelf not doing anything. After a bit of surgery I had a working CD drive on my XP box and was ready to get back to work. I booted off the CD and went int orecivery mode, a little touch and go there too. I had to boot twice because the first time the install script blew up on line 5400 (!). I thought that my CD drive was screwed up or heaven forbid, my XP CD was damaged! I don't think that Microsoft will replace one if you send it back. I suspect that having their customers pay $200 for media makes them smile quite a bit.
Anyway, I think I got off lucky because it just took a CHKDSK and a FIXBOOT to solve the problem.
Sounds like its about time that I get rid of some of my older smaller drives, I need to free up some space and do some migration soon.
I powered up the monitor and instead of the screen saver it simply said 'PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT'. There goes my evening.
I tried a number of different boot configurations but nothing worked. It would power up, ask if I wanted to boot into XPpro or 2000 and then prompt me with the usual apologies about not shutting down correctly and would you like to boot into safe mode. Most of the computer I see at this point won't even boot into safe mode, mine was no different.
I set it to not reboot on an error in hope that I'd spot something useful. I was rewarded by a nice BSOD stating that the boot drive was unmountable. Well what the hell had I been working off from so far?
Time for the recovery CD. It would have been nice to have had this happen to a system with a CD drive in it but that went away long ago in order to hold more hard drives.
Good thing my Debian Linux box is sitting on a shelf not doing anything. After a bit of surgery I had a working CD drive on my XP box and was ready to get back to work. I booted off the CD and went int orecivery mode, a little touch and go there too. I had to boot twice because the first time the install script blew up on line 5400 (!). I thought that my CD drive was screwed up or heaven forbid, my XP CD was damaged! I don't think that Microsoft will replace one if you send it back. I suspect that having their customers pay $200 for media makes them smile quite a bit.
Anyway, I think I got off lucky because it just took a CHKDSK and a FIXBOOT to solve the problem.
Sounds like its about time that I get rid of some of my older smaller drives, I need to free up some space and do some migration soon.
posted by JT at 10:54 PM
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