PC problemette

[muguk]

Was working fine last night pre-pub quiz.  Burning off a few bits and pieces and then it just hung.

Powered down, back up again.  Gets as far as the Boot CD/DVD prompt and sits there with a flashing cursor.

Left it off over night thinking it was a heat problem .. tried again this morning, same problem.   There aren't any BIOS beep codes going on either to suggest a possible problem

Any ideas as to what I should be looking at?  I took the lid off it this morning for a cursory glance and, other than a much needed dust vacuum session, I can't see anything obvious.

[Rink]

First thing I would check in this case, is that I haven't got any strange disks in the drive. Then, since you're not getting any actual error messages, drop into the BIOS and change the boot order so that the hard drive is the only boot device. This should be enough to tell you whether the issue is definitely occurring during the boot sector check/Windows/OS loader.

Edit: You could go as far as unplugging the cable from the CD/DVD drive, in case a fault in there is holding things up during boot.

[AndyRCM]

I agree with Karl . . . best thing(s) to try first . . .

A

[Phu]

If that fails then it looks like your boot sector(s) are iffy. There are two things to try to restore them (if you need to):

1) Boot your OS install CD and goto the Recovery Console. I can't remember the exact command off the top of my head, but it's something like "FIXMBR" to fix the master boot record.

2) If you have another machine (or can go to a friend's place who has a USB<->HD adapter) you can restore the NTLDR with a program called "BootICE" (freely downloadable).

-- Richard

[muguk]

Problem solved - but not with a good outcome.

The good news: I gave it a good vacuuming whilst the lid was off and unplugged the boot drive.  Same error.  Plugged it back in and unplugged 2nd drive.  Machine boots up OK.

This is the 2nd SATA drive that this machine has killed off .. so now I've got to try and rescue what I can from this drive by sticking it into an external caddy.  That's the bad news.

[muguk]

Another update.  Trying to burn off a disc and it seems that whilst ImgBurn recognises my Blu-Ray writer it won't start burning anything.  Like last night it's just sat there @ 0% and not moving at all.

Rest of machine is working OK albeit with odd freezes before returning back to normal.

Is my media centre's PSU on its way out?  Or shall I just swap out the current SATA cables and replace with some unused ones and try again?

[Rink]

Hmmm... power isn't really my area but i do know weird things can happen if your PSU isn't quite cutting the mustard. In theory, low or intermitent power could crash a hard drive but i've never managed it personally.

Was your recent bluray issue with or without SATA drive 2 plugged in? Any USB devices attached?

On the software side, there are Windows performance issues that can upset more sensitive optical drives. If the system worked with an alternate/clean OS installation (spare hard drive / LiveCD) then you'd know not to bother thinking about the PSU any more - not that you'd ever usually regret an upgrade in that area. You haven't said which OS you use, but IMHO trying to diagnose performance issues with Windows is rarely worth the effort compared to jist doing a clean install and getting on with your evening.

[muguk]

In the last hour I've:

a) updated the BIOS

b) replaced the old 2 x 1Gb DDR RAM with 2 x 2Gb DDR RAM

c) done 12 Vista updates


Probably, in hindsight, shouldn't have done all three things at the same time (well, stages 1 & 2 of Windows update were done before PC was rebooted but *after* BIOS update .. ).  So there was a lot of "New Hardware Found" to sit through after it finally did return me back to a Windows desktop.

Now I've got to power it down again and swap over the power splitter with a new one and see if that allows the SATA drive to work.  If not, then I'll have to put in another one (I've got spares) and then see if I can rescue the data via a USB caddy.

[muguk]

Shut down, reconnected the non-working SATA drive, rebooted and no noises heard from the drive (unlike before).

All back working as it was (but with more memory).

Think I really should just start again though with a fresh drive and convert this last remaining non-Windows 7 machine into a Windows 7 one.  Maybe over the weekend.

Thanks for all the suggestions

[AndyRCM]

or buy a Mac?

[muguk]

*looks in deep empty holes that used to have "piggy bank" written above them ... and comes up empty*

In all honesty, as nice as they look, I've never had use for one.  I don't need to know how to use a Mac to do my job for the last 15 years (unlike yourself) so never seen the appeal of them.

Each to their own

[AndyRCM]