How I spent my Yesterday
Come in to work, log into my PC, take care of some quick things, checking my mail.. oh hey, spontaneous system reboot. Swell. And then it fails partway through booting. Well, I "fixed" this once before by just doing a round through safe mode, let's see if that works...
Nope, no dice, still won't boot in regular mode. Okay, time to research... given where it's hanging, Google suggests chkdsk, might be bad sectors or something. Hmm, only now it's not even getting far enough in Safe Mode to run console commands, that's no good. Trying an XP recovery disk, it wants the Administrator password. Shit, because this edition of XP hides the admin account, nobody *knows* that password, since it hasn't been used since the machine was set up half a decade ago, and mysteriously it doesn't seem to be any of the lab standards. The three account with admin access are irrelevant since I can't boot to a login screen. Great.
So, yank out the boot drive, stick it in a different PC, and run chkdsk on it there. THat's working... but will take 3 or 4 hours, great. Meanwhile, what else can we do? Here's an Ubuntu boot CD, let's see if that gets through booting. Nope. Okay, what else could be wrong? Memory? Try taking out 2 of the 4 chips, no dice; swap those two with the other two, still fails, okay it's probably not the memory. Also tried disconnecting all the other drives to make sure they're not screwing with anything - nope.
Okay, it could be the graphics card failing when boot tries to switch into a higher resolution. Let's try swapping in a dinky old card. Hey, success! I can boot to an Ubuntu desktop! Shame about that nice graphics card, but I can put in another medium-level one stolen from a different machine (unscrew unscrew, swap swap, screw screw) and... oh hey, it's failing to boot again. What? Also, the fans seem to have trouble spinning up. Hmmmmmmm.... that sounds like power issues.
Meanwhile, chkdsk has finally finished and says my boot drive is perfectly fine. Okay, put that back in. I think it's time for a new power supply. Quick trip out to Intrex. Disconnect and reconnect: four hard drives, DVD drive, floppy drive, two motherboard connections, graphics card aux power, threading through tiny holes in the case. Ow, my fingertips. Stupid stiff molex connectors.
But it works! Halle-frickin-lujah.
Oh hey, it's after 5pm, that was a productive day.
Nope, no dice, still won't boot in regular mode. Okay, time to research... given where it's hanging, Google suggests chkdsk, might be bad sectors or something. Hmm, only now it's not even getting far enough in Safe Mode to run console commands, that's no good. Trying an XP recovery disk, it wants the Administrator password. Shit, because this edition of XP hides the admin account, nobody *knows* that password, since it hasn't been used since the machine was set up half a decade ago, and mysteriously it doesn't seem to be any of the lab standards. The three account with admin access are irrelevant since I can't boot to a login screen. Great.
So, yank out the boot drive, stick it in a different PC, and run chkdsk on it there. THat's working... but will take 3 or 4 hours, great. Meanwhile, what else can we do? Here's an Ubuntu boot CD, let's see if that gets through booting. Nope. Okay, what else could be wrong? Memory? Try taking out 2 of the 4 chips, no dice; swap those two with the other two, still fails, okay it's probably not the memory. Also tried disconnecting all the other drives to make sure they're not screwing with anything - nope.
Okay, it could be the graphics card failing when boot tries to switch into a higher resolution. Let's try swapping in a dinky old card. Hey, success! I can boot to an Ubuntu desktop! Shame about that nice graphics card, but I can put in another medium-level one stolen from a different machine (unscrew unscrew, swap swap, screw screw) and... oh hey, it's failing to boot again. What? Also, the fans seem to have trouble spinning up. Hmmmmmmm.... that sounds like power issues.
Meanwhile, chkdsk has finally finished and says my boot drive is perfectly fine. Okay, put that back in. I think it's time for a new power supply. Quick trip out to Intrex. Disconnect and reconnect: four hard drives, DVD drive, floppy drive, two motherboard connections, graphics card aux power, threading through tiny holes in the case. Ow, my fingertips. Stupid stiff molex connectors.
But it works! Halle-frickin-lujah.
Oh hey, it's after 5pm, that was a productive day.