The pride and icon of my IT know-how, my self-assembled desktop, went dead on me on Sunday. To be honest, the fella had been "grumbling" for some coming weeks already. It will randomly cough out a weird beep code on POST which totally eluded my sphere of understanding. A look up at AMI (American Megatrend Inc.) POST beep codes on Google turned up negative as well. (My Bios is AMI hence)
And so there i was, restarting the old geezer repeatedly till i realised that this time, it is for real. Annoyance turned into anal irritation and finally morphed into unspeakable horror.
I COULDN'T FOR A WHALE SHARK'S SAKE, BOOT INTO WINDOWS.
I started to dancing for the computer gods in the hope that the gods will answer my prayer and get the geezer up and going. But oh well, the computer never made it pass the loading screen. My hunch (make that an old one) was that the HDD was going kaput. i never forgot the chagrin i had when i asked for a Seagate HDD during purchase but they gave me a Maxtor manufactured one.
And so course of action no. 1:
I went digging for the XP installation CD and then booted up on CD ROM mode. And then it was welcome to computing hell Mister. Oh i so hate computing in the DOS environment when everything is so cold. Black background, white text, no mouse support etc etc In addition the computer frequently swears at you using illegible error codes. To top it off, it throws in a vulgarity or two courtesy of the motherboard speaker.
*beep beep beep!!
So okay, then i tried running chkdsk. The computer had the decency to sarcastically inform me that oh... the hard disk seem okay. Then upon running chkdsk using the p switch reveals one or 2 unrecoverable errors. Worrying.
Response no. 1:
I thought perhaps the HDD's MBR (Master Boot Record) and Boot Sector was gone thus i ran fixmbr and fixboot. i happily typed exit to exit the damn console and then exasperatedly receive yet another failed boot. $#^&%&*^&*^(*^
So i checked myself into hell again and then ran chkdsk with the r switch. Because i realised with a big OOHH that chkdsk with the p switch only locates bad sectors, recover the data in them but pretty much leave the damn bad sector to its demise. Very helpful.
Yup. So it was chkdsk /r. i spent an eternity watching the progress of the process inching towards 100%. At some points in time, i was alarmed to see the progress actually regress. I thought it was Windows's idea of saying HAHAHAHA. But finally chkdsk did went into completion. I realised that watching grass grow is much more exciting.
AGAIN. i left the console and realised uh oh, XP still wouldn't load. At this point in time, i thought that maybe the HDD is doomed and reformatting is in the works. So i cleverly went to hook up the 320GB fella to my sister's computer and hey presto! Data is accessible :D I was thankful i did too. Transferring 60GB of data HDD to HDD using other means other than SATA 2 is no joke. Still it took 2 hours of my life. Hey but i made myself tea and i studied during that period too. Productive with a capital P :D
And then in the meantime, i kicked myself in the butt like 5 times. Make that 4. For failing to make a slipstreamed copy of XP SP3. However, i still had the common sense to download SP3 chock a block, ready to chuck it into XP when the fresh installation was done.
And then yada yada, i busied myself readying the installation followed by the installation of the various hardware onboard. AND THEN I REALISED SOMETHING was wrong with my screen. Choppy screen, white box on cursor. BAD real bad... Something told me that my X1950Pro was about to make its final journey to the recycle bin. I googled the weird beep code that had plagued for so many months and realised with a yelp of pain (on behalf of my wallet) that indeed the big guy was about to hit the sack with an air of finality.
What to do? A man's got to do what he's got to do. Get another video card. I got myself a MSI HD4670 1GB GDDR3 clocked at 400Mhz from Fuwell, my favourite SLS dealer. Bla bla bla then it was time for the Change of Command parade from the venerable X1950Pro to HD4670. I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that this new kid needed no molex power connector. Cool!
This means power savings for me. Good for me. Good for Mother Earth. And the cooling fan for the new video card was waaaaaaay quieter than the old one. I remember when i just bought my assembled system then, my mum was in the room and she thought it was raining outside. It turns out to be the fan of the X1950Pro churning merrily for all it's worth.
Installation done but unbeknownst to me, i was set to enter hell once again. I continued with readying my computer by installing the different drivers and then IT CAME. The computer just yanked the carpet under me by restarting spontaneously. I was pretty Gibbs energy wasn't negative, change in Entropy wasn't positive and change in Enthalpy wasn't negative. So whats that show of spontaneity man?
Initially i dismissed the first few episodes as random bouts of fit which computers throw on a purple moon. But after the 9999999th time, i decided that hey, they didn't use the purple moon analogously for no rhyme and reason you know. Lucky for me and (my wallet on hindsight) that i caught sight of a blue flash briefly when the system stalled and reboots. Something told me it was BSOD!!
Okay to confirm that, i went to adjust properties to disable automatic restarts on occurences of fatal system errors. TRUE ENOUGH and as blue as can be was the BSOD. And all the error did tell me was that it was a 0x.....50a error along with the error description of "page_fault_in_nonpaged_area".
Holy moo moo! i shrank 3 shirt sizes when i saw that. It was a clear indication of error. The prospect of me having to part with more cash for say a faulty PSU or maybe motherboard was unpalatable to say the least. Generally when you get this error, one can go celebrate. Because the cause can be anything from hardware failure (which you have to determine), unsigned drivers, unruly drivers which abuse their kernel mode rights, erratic HDD, virus infestation and poorly fitted hardware etc. HAHAS in a nutshell, ANYTHING.
It feels like playing Russian Roulette during the troubleshooting process. i reseated the RAM and the video card like perhaps 300 times. Because the system regularly restarts in an interval of say 10 minutes upon successful login, i was essentially fighting against time as i ran virus scans to determine whether my computer had the swine flu or not. And then lucky me, i encountered another BSOD which revealed the offending entity. It turns out to be the version 4.0 driver for my Linksys USB wireless adaptor WUSB54G. Good thing i had a backup Linksys PCI wireless adaptor. I was thankful that i needn't go through the entire troubleshooting cycle. Still troubleshooting and resolution took 2 days 1 night. PITA. period
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