View Full Version : how very very odd
Just went to boot my main machine and its not even getting into windows. Even safe mode is having none of it. Was working fine yesterday so I'm really struggling as to what the hecks happened in a day of sitting there??
Just incase the overclock has become unstable, i've put back to stock and its still not doing it. The raid 1 arrays are fine, its just having none of it. How queer.
Literally just gone into safe mode. Now crashing going to desktop, something has royally fubared :( Really really not what I need at the moment
How old is the motherboard? My original P4 did the whole 'refuse to boot Windows' thing like yours. That turned out to be blown capacitors on the motherboard.
The same PC (with new motherboard) died again a few years later due to a capacitor exploding inside the PSU. That one also blew out a mains fuse and shut down my UPS, so there was no mistaking that.
Can you see a pattern here? (I get solid capacitor mobos now for a reason)
Its just so random thats thrown me. Normally windows gets clunky before giving up the ghost
Hdd gone, bloody brilliant that i'm not told what one has gone!!!!
edit: one of my old 160's looks to have gone, and some of the key windows files on the main hdds has corrupted.
Was thinking hdd as I was reading, was gonna suggest booting a Linux kernel because....
bloody brilliant that i'm not told what one has gone!!!!
Windows sucks at handling dying/dead block devices, especially when the system partition is involved. The linux kernel won't work miracles, but it'll at least bitch at you with enough info to give you somewhere to start.
Hope you got a recent backup and/or you can get to your data through other means.
Yup. Booting Linux and running 'dmesg' will in many cases tell you more than you probably ever need to know about your hardware. :)
As Daz says, hope nothing vital is lost forever.
Yep I had backups of the data. However I also now have post dieing backups from the raid 1 drives. It seems that somehow windows has nuked key files which will stop it from booting. Windows just has this ability. Hardware wise (clocking) its 100% solid as a rock as that will normally cripple things very quickly.
Now the mammoth task of rebuilding windows begins. Even after installing tonnes of stuff there will still be loads that you will have missed. Just found a FDD drive for the raid drivers. Hopefully Vista will have some way when installing of using USB sticks to install drivers seeing as FDD's are being phased out.
Hopefully Vista will have some way when installing of using USB sticks to install drivers seeing as FDD's are being phased out.
It does :) And on the fly as well, no more 'Press F6 to load drivers'. Think you can even mount a network drive at that screen, cant remember. You can certainly hot-plug storage though.
Admiral Huddy
01-10-2007, 12:21
Damn hhds!!.. I've had on average one a year go for the last 5.
They maybe cheap as chips now but their realibilty has a lot to be desired.
You say that, but I've not had a hard drive fail for years on my own machines (touches lots of wood (fnarrrr)). They still really don't like heat though ime, most of the server disk failures we've had at work over the past 2 years have been because of air-con failures.
Admiral Huddy
01-10-2007, 12:37
Must have just got unlucky!
The last one I had was quite costly.. lost my holiday pics :(
Now the vista usb driver stick option does sound good. To reinstall i'm having to take the side of the case off to reinstall an old FDD.
The reliability of hdds is something that I am starting to get concerned about Huddy. My hdds sit in the low 30s thanks to slow turning 120mm fans blowing air over them. Its just the thought of that much info being held together by a mechanical process :/ Sure I had weekly backups as more of a general method but I do think that in the future I need to decide on a more permenant better planned solution
At the moment my backup strategy is fairly contained. Important data (personal files, emails and photos) copied first to another internal HDD doing nothing, and then to a E-Sata attached hard drive also doing nothing. Soon it will be handled between two machines. The server will be in the garage, hosting the files and backing them up nightly to the same external disk, but in addition to that I'll also keep copies of the important data on my workstation. 1 because it has the space, and 2 because it's a separate system in a separate room. I occasionally take system images (mainly of the Linux systems), but tbh because I always keep the personal data out of the equation, rebuilding a system is a largely trivial task (as it should be).
[edit]I should also say my server will also handle the backups of my DC and Exchange VM, which takes rebuilds completely off the table in a recovery situation. <3 vmware.
I do a nightly backup from my PC and Mac (when it's working!) to my TeraStation then do an rsync from the TeraStation to my server which lives in the office.
I need to get my data into a state that I can back it up. I have stuff scattered all over the shop from about 15 years worth of PC use. :/
Getting there though, slowly. The PVR box in the living room now has a few big disks, so I'll offload all (non-personal) video on to that. That won't get backed up - if it dies, it dies. That should free up space elsewhere for me to start moving stuff around and archiving/deleting what I don't need, and backing up what I do.
It's just finding the time that's the problem.
I do have all recent emails backed up in three places though, which at least covers the incoming side for purchase references and stuff like that.
vBulletin® v3.7.4, Copyright ©2000-2025, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.