Archive for December, 2007

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Blnking Dash Problem: The Non-Solution

Friday, December 28th, 2007

I figured I should probably post my solution to the blinking dash problem. As you may know, few days ago I rebooted my machine only to be greeted a blank screen and a blinking dash in the upper left corner of the screen. This was happening right after the BIOS memory tests. The system was booting just fine from the CD and so I was able to back everything up.

I tried just about everything to get my windows installation bootable, including running FIXMBR from the recovery console, repairing windows installation, doing parallel install and etc. Nothing worked.

I’m glad to report that I finally got this machine up and running. My solution?

Format the hard drive and reinstall windows.

Yup, sorry that’s the only thing that helped. I tried, and tried to find a better way to do this but there was just no way this machine would cooperate with me. The interesting question is: what caused this? Was it the graphics card as Alphast suggested in the other thread? I kinda doubt it since the installation went so smoothly after I reformatted. Was it a hard drive issue? It would be odd since this was a relatively new HD. I got it in July when my old system drive failed on me. Could it be the HD controller? But if so, how come my second drive is working just fine?

I hope this was just some random fluke…

As a side note, I noticed that it only took me few minutes to get the machine to the point of usability after I finished installing the drivers and AV suite. Here is the list of apps I really needed to function:

  1. Firefox
  2. Vim
  3. WinRar
  4. VLC
  5. uTorrent

That’s about all I needed to feel at home. In fact I don’t really “need” VLC and uTorrent right away, but I installed them for a good measure. I will probably need MS Office on here sooner or later, but for now I’m fine. I hardly use that damn thing anyway. I will probably end up installing MikTex and Emacs first. :P

I guess this is an evidence that I do live in the browser more than I think. Once I copied my Firefox profile from the backup drive, I was ready to pick up things where I left few days ago. Btw, does your browser let you completely save the current state (including all the open tabs in the current session) by simply copying a folder? This is why I love Firefox so much – all my plugins, bookmarks, custom adblock filters and greasemonkey scripts fit nicely in just few KB – and that’s just about everything I need for my daily browsing and blogging. :)

What are the crucial apps that you install after a clean install?

Posted in personal, tech support, technology, windows | 9 Comments »

Infinite Loop BSOD (nv4_disp)

Friday, December 28th, 2007

I love easily solvable problems. I call them instant hero issues – you can solve them in 5 minutes flat, and you instantly become a hero. I wish my problem that I was struggling with for the last two days was this easy to fix. A guy dropped off a desktop at my desk yesterday with a BSOD on boot. I looked at the message and it said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that nv4_disp caused an infinite loop.

I love infinite loops – they are awesome. Whenever I cause one, I sit back and say “behold mortals, for I have created infinity”. Of course I can usually kill my own infinite loops. Ones that occur during the windows boot process are not nearly as much fun. So I decided to track down nv4_disp which turned out to be an Nvidia display driver. Thanks Nvida!

Solution was trivial:

  1. Boot windows into Safe Mode with Networking
  2. Go to Nvidia website and nab brand new set of drivers for the GeForce FX 5200
  3. Install the drivers
  4. Reboot
  5. ???
  6. Profit (INSTANT HERO BONUS +30)

Apparently this problem is caused by the well known “NVidia Sucks Ass” issue with the GeForce drivers. Hopefully this won’t happen again – the drivers are up-to-date now, and the machine seems to be fully functional. But you never know. At least I should be able to easily fix it next time if this thing comes back.

I know, I know – a half witted monkey with a full frontal lobotomy could probably fix this. Sigh… I wish my users were as smart as monkeys with full frontal lobotomy. But you know what, sometimes it’s nice to solve an easy problem for a change. Cause, really these are the only types of problems that can give you this sort of instant gratification. Putting a check in the win column now and then, and actually helping someone gives us the energy to plug away on those hopless projects that have no real solutions – only workarounds an mega-hacks. It’s nice to have someone actually thank you for resolving a problem rather than trying to explain to them you not secretly the infrastructure and crashing the servers just to have something to do. ;P

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Posted in tech support, technology, windows | 5 Comments »

Blinking Dash Update And The Wisdom of Yahoo Answers

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

I did some more tinkering with my blinking dash issue and I found out the following things:

  1. FIXMBR + FIXBOOT did nothing. Fortunately it didn’t seem to hose my partition table so that’s good
  2. Booting from the WinXP SP2 CD and choosing to repair the installation did nothing
  3. Running the Windows Repair from the WinXP CD did nothing
  4. Parallel install of windows on the same partition (without formating) did nothing
  5. My backups seem to be ok – Captive NTFS actually works in Knoppix these days (yay)

I will try few other tips I got in the last thread but I guess I will need to format and reinstall Windows in the end. But will this work? The repair option should have theoretically fixed any corrupted files on windows side. FIXMBR and FIXBOOT should have fixed the boot entries. WTF else is there? What the hell is preventing windows from booting? Chances are that I might still have this issue after I reinstall. :(

In the meantime I wanted to share something very special that I have found while googling for potential solutions to my problem:

SHUT DOWN YOUR HOLE COMPUTER!

Best advice evar: “SHUT DOWN YOUR HOLE COMPUTER”. LOL! This, ladies and gentlemen is the collective wisdom of Yahoo Answers. I swear, I haven’t read a Yahoo answer thread that didn’t make me chuckle and weep for the downfall of humanity at the same time. And I’m not even talking about technology advice – any thread on that site is LULZ-worthy to some degree. :P

Update 12/28/2007 04:49:22 PM

I found a solution to this. Well, sort off. Read the linked post.

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Posted in personal, tech support, technology, windows, wtf | 5 Comments »

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