Zugg Software :: View topic - Murphy's Law

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2005 6:15 pm

It happened again...

On Dec 31st, we were planning to have a New Year's Eve party at our house for some friends. We were planning to watch the entire Extended-Edition Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have my game computer hooked up to our big projector TV downstairs and have the brilliant idea of loading the entire trilogy onto the hard disk so that it could be shown without any interruptions (like disk changes).

So, during the week after Christmas I ripped the DVDs down to my big hard drive. It all went well and was working great. On Thursday night, Dec 30th, I was playing World of Warcraft, when at about 10pm the game hung.

Oh well, I thought, it does that sometimes. So I rebooted the computer...and got a "blue screen" error message. What the ??? OK, power off...wait a minute...power on. Another blue-screen error during Windows startup. In fact, I never even saw the Windows XP logo this time.

Reboot again, go into the BIOS, check the settings. I've had some problems with the clock speed in the past, so I thought maybe it was too hot from being on all day. So I turned down the CPU speed just in case. Rebooted...another blue-screen (a different one, but still some sort of hardware problem).

Sigh. So here I am, hours away from a bunch of people coming over to watch the movie. Sure, I could still play the disks from the DVDs the normal way. But I was really upset because this was my game computer and I was planning to play a lot more World of Warcraft during vacation. Added to the frustration was that I had just gotten sick the day before and felt like ****. So I was not in a very good mood at this point. (In fact, Chiara would probably put my sour mood a bit more strongly. I was *very* upset).

What do you do in a situation like this when a computer looks totally dead? Try to boot it with another disk? Well, I don't have another boot disk for that system unfortunately. The only boot disk I could think of was the Windows XP CD itself. Sure, I thought, I'll try to do a "repair". So I load the Windows XP disk and select Repair. During the repair process, the computer crashes again. That's bad.

OK, so I can't repair it. Then I'll just reinstall Windows. So I boot the disk again and this time I tell it to reinstall Windows. Looks like its going to work, but after about five minutes, it crashes again.

So it's got to be a hardware problem at that point. Maybe something had gotten fried? I opened up the computer and poked around. Nothing was very hot. Nothing was obviously fried. The only thing I could think to even try at that point was to remove the extra 512 MB memory strip that I had installed in November. That was the last change I had made to the system.

Of course, at this point the computer is unbootable because of the failed Windows XP install. So, after removing the extra memory I boot the Windows XP disk and try to install it again.

This time it works! After an hour or so, the computer boots and I have a basic Windows XP install. It's very sick however. Has anyone else tried reinstalling Windows XP from the original CD after you have installed the SP2 update? It's not pretty. Apparently SP2 updates some stuff that isn't replaced by the original CD (especially Internet Explorer files). So you have this wierd system with lots of problems. Like the login screen which hangs for about 2 minutes before displaying the login prompt. Or, once you are logged in, some of the system services don't run. And when you go to the Windows Update, Internet Explorer just hangs.

Well, Windows Update *eventually* displays something after many delays, probably the same problems as the login delays. After updating the Windows Update software itself (reboot, wait for the startup delay), then run Update again (still has the 3 minute or so delay). Then install all of the required updates, which takes about 30 minutes (and doesn't even include SP2 yet). Reboot again. Still has the startup delay. Run Windows Update *again*. The delay in Windows Update appears to be gone at this point. Now SP2 is listed. So we run the SP2 update. This takes another hour or so. But this time, when we reboot again, the startup delay is gone.

It was now about 2am Friday morning. The computer seemed to be mostly working. All of the applications were still installed, although a couple of them complained that they were no longer registered. I was able to play the movies that were on the hard disk.

The only bad side effect from the whole experience is that for some reason, about half the entries in the Start/Program menu are missing. For example, Microsoft Office is installed, but not listed in the Start/Program menu. If I go and find the EXE file for MSWORD and double-click it, it runs fine. Apparently that first failed Windows Install or Repair attempt trashed the Start/Programs folder and removed a lot of shortcuts. But these are just file entries that are missing...the actual registry appears fine (thank goodness).

If anyone knows if Windows saves any backup of the Start/Programs entries anywhere during updates, let me know and I'll look for it. Until them I'm just adding entries manually.

The next day, after only a few hours of sleep, we started the LOTR movies promptly at 11am and they ran flawlessly until 11pm. The party was fine. No evidence of the problems from the night before.

So, all of the problems can be blamed on that bad memory chip. I've never seen memory fail like this before. Fortunately, the small computer store near my house where I bought it exchanged it without any problem (I didn't even have the receipt anymore!) And so now I've got the memory reinstalled and it's all working fine again.

But this was yet another frustrating example of my bad luck with computers in 2004.

My sinus infection lasted about a week. I'm just now feeling better. I'll be back early next week to start talking about plans for 2005 and to write my yearly New Years letter. Until then, I hope everyone else had a more relaxing holiday and New Year.

GURU Joined: 24 Sep 2000 Posts: 1237 Location: USA

Sounds like it might be (past) time to get yerself a nice automatic backup system.

I like how this one looks & works: http://www.techworthy.com/PCUpgrade/NovDec2004/CMS-Velocity-External-SATA.htm
(prices): http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=1695338

If your primary hard drive ever fails, this one just takes over and becomes the new boot drive. Would've saved you that reloading hassle, and probably would've ruled out disk/software problems as your culprit, too.

There's other solutions, like www.Mirra.com 's Mirra product, but at $750 that's a bit excessive. Western Digital has a Digital Media Center that does the same kind of thing. Tom's Hardware reviewed one not too long ago.

Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2005 6:50 am

Yeah, I need to consider something like that for several of my computer systems. Right now the only system with any sort of backups is the main development system. The game system never warranted much attention before, and I can't actually afford much of anything right now. If I make some money with eMobius, I'll be doing some serious computer overhauls and upgrades. The game system is the newest computer in the house and it's 3 years old now.

But yes, some sort of RAID or disk system would certainly help in these situations.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Heh, sorry I wasn't around in the holidays, I woulda told you to check your RAM first ... random blue screens usually means faulty RAM.

Tell you my murphy story... from just before the holidays... I buy a brand new laptop (for work) on the wednesday, on thursday I load it with windows / development tools / etc, all good. On friday I get on the plan and fly international for business. On the plane I turn on my laptop to do some work, about 2 minutes in, boom, blue screen. Try turning it on again, but now it won't even power on! Not good, not good, especially since I have to do a high profile presentation on the monday. Anyway, after stressing out on the flight and to the next day I buy some small screwdrivers and try to work out whats wrong... took out the RAM module I had bought... nope, still not powering on. I had to pull the keyboard out to get at the factory RAM stick, but that was the thing at fault. Not happy, 2 day old laptop and the factory RAM was dead. I was so lucky I had upgraded to 1 gig RAM, so I had one functioning chip after getting the factory crap out of there.

And just yesterday my friends 2 month old stick of RAM died. What is it with computers these days? Course his crashes were in the nvidia drivers so he went out and bought an ati x800 pro assuming that it was the nvidia card... only to find it blue screening with the new card. Eventually he took out the RAM and no more crashes, so I guess he made an expensive debugging decision, but the card is very nice hehe.