Le Sigh

[Doctor Destiny 41]

Right, so I'm sitting here posting this on my laptop where my desktop usually sits. It's on the workbench, open, dismantled and in pieces. It doesn't boot now. Now let's go back to see this chain of events...

 

It all started last Thursday. My brother has a slightly older machine than I do so his is sort of... archaic in today's terms. He wanted a new processor and was looking around NewEgg for one and he wanted a dual core, naturally. We went over some and I recommended a mid-range Pentium Dual Core, an E5200 to be exact. Cheap, low watt, dual core, all around goodness for all. Right?

 

Well, all weekend he's all jazzed up about a nice, cheap upgrade. The package arrived yesterday around 1 in the afternoon. He got it, unhooked everything and put his machine on the workbench. He fenagled with his cords for a little bit, organizing this and that... while bumping my power strip and zapping power to my desktop. That didn't cause an issue but a small argument ensued as they often do.

 

He worked on his a little, taking his old processor out and placing his new one in. He hooked everything back up, plugged it all back into the power strip and turned it on. Fans whirred to life and you heard beeping like it was booting but no video. He fenagled a little more and still nothing. So he got the BRILLIANT idea of putting it in mine!

 

Reluctantly, I agreed but only after I was done helping my dad with something else and finishing a game of Zero Hour I was playing. I got done helping my dad and ZH crashed. Bummer. So I unplugged everything and organized my cords too since I finally had a good chance and good excuse.

 

We swapped processors so he took my old one and I took his new one. I hooked mine back up and guess what. No video. NONE. Same problem, so thinking his processor was bad, we swapped everything back to normal, except he took my old video card and put it in instead of his crappy one.

 

He booted his up again and got some funky, but understandable, BIOS error saying something about CPU clocks being mismatched. A little time in the BIOS, and his was ready to go, and back in action in no time. Then I booted mine back up and got a different, but expected, BIOS error about CPU clocks being off. A bit of BIOS fixing and I rebooted. It POSTed fine and hung after it loaded the BIOS and POSTed. I flipped it off and tried it again but this time I got something I'd never seen before - Windows ARC Firmware was bad, stating the "configuration had too many entries."

 

I rebooted and flashed my BIOS, reset my CMOS and came back to the same damned error! Google was really of very little help since the ARC protocol is outdated and not properly followed in every instance. After googling around, I found a few answers ranging from a bad MBR to a ztyped up boot.ini. No big deal - I'll just run fixmbr off my Windows XP CD. Hah, no such luck. I popped it in, booted with the CD and it bombed while loading setup files saying .sys files were corrupt! I knew that to be false so we tried it with my brother's XP disc and same thing. Stymied there, I tried some other things before giving up for the day.

 

I asked my dad later and he mentioned the RAM. That made sense since we had worked on a machine before that said random system files were corrupted and it was the memory causing the problem. So this morning, I reseated my RAM and it finally made it through the XP setup to the Recovery Console. Ready to do fixmbr, fixboot and sfc /scannow, I was pumped and feeling good... no such luck. I forgot my admin password! Stymied again!

 

However, with the RAM ideas in mind, I tried to boot anyway. I got to the loader where you choose what Windows to boot into - Safe Mode and its variants or Start Windows Normally. So I said, **** it, boot normally. It tried, blue screened and rebooted immediately. I can't even read the ****ing error to know where to start!

 

Though, with my testing, I determined one of my new RAM sticks is partially bad and one is fine. The partially bad one will boot but it does not initialize the GPU. I even tried with my old RAM and it did the same so the Windows install has likely been corrupted.

 

I have one saving grace - my dad. I'll just use ERD Commander, reset my password and boot in so I can modify my boot.ini and then I can jack into the Recovery Console with my new password to run what I need. I pray to ****ing god it fixes my issues since I'm ass broke and can't afford new hardware to fix it. I'll just make my asshat brother pay for what needs replacing.

 

So. Never let anyone talk you into something so stupid. I knew I should have told him to shove it up his ass.

 

Bah.

[Luk3us 63]

Hehehe, sounds like it was a long night. Gotta hate it when nothing seems to work. Although at least you worked out there are some faulty bits in your comp.

[Doctor Destiny 41]

As it turns out, the RAM is still good! I have the 'bad' stick in my second slot and XP is movin' faster then a cokehead running from the police!

 

Anyhow, the story continues further. My dad got home with a fresh copy of ERD Commander 2002. I popped it in my DVD tray and away we go, into the XP shell. However, before we get to the shell itself, it initializes a few networking components, one of which failed to load. No big deal, I just clicked on and let it go. I finally got into the XP shell itself and before it lets me have control, it says the four main registry hives are missing or corrupt. Not good but no big deal since I wanted to reinstall Windows anyway. But I was hoping to save the install but that was a real downer.

 

I wanted to run Locksmith to unlock my admin account. I went to run it and got an error - the user database does not exist.

 

So not only did the registry get hosed to all bejesus and back, I DIDN'T HAVE A SINGLE REAL USER LEFT!

 

I didn't think much of it until I went to explore my file hives. I clicked C:\ to expand and NOTHING. ERD Commander didn't pick up ANY of my files and my heart nearly skipped a beat. I thought my files were all ****ing toast! My brother was around and he said my dad had had ERD Commander do that before so my files should still have been there. I was tired for the night and just wanted to do nothing so I got back on my laptop.

 

This morning, I took the hard drive out and used my dad's IDE -> USB to connect my drive to this thing. I plugged it in and Windows saw it right away, installed it and said it was ready to go. I opened and success! FILES! So I plugged my External drive in and started the long process of copying files over!

 

Finally got that done, then I copied my settings. By then I needed to shower since I had gone to cut the grass while files went USB -> USB. Finally got everything I needed copied over. I disconnected both drives and set my hard drive on the open case to cool down before I proceeded. It cooled quickly so I got it put back in. Then I put my 9600GT back in and placed the 'bad' RAM stick in the open slot. I flipped the tower on its 'feet' so to speak and turned it on. I checked the BIOS first and it showed 4096MB of RAM installed. Good sign there.

 

Exited the BIOS and I had already dropped my XP Pro disc in the tray. Hit Enter and booted with it. I ran through the usual **** with installs and it detected my old one just fine, which I thought was odd. Either way, no Repairs on this one. Fresh install and a full format, not quick. I wanted to erase everything properly.

 

Windows installed cleanly and easily with no problems at all. Now I'm running Windows updates.

 

After all of that, it turned out to be a corrupted install of my OS.

 

Shit.

[TheBlackOut 7]

Wow. **** sux bro has never applied more than this. Sounds like headache central.