Terminally Incoherent

I still have no solution to this problem. Will Sheldon had some useful suggestions for me yesterday, but messing around with boot.ini did not do anything. The /sos option did not display anything. I also tried stuff like /safeboot, /safeboot:minimal, /basevideo and etc. It seems that the problem happens before NT loader even gets to parse the ini file soo none of these instructions really do much.

Ben on the other hand seems to think it might be a power supply problem. It could be but I have full access to the hard drive when I boot off the CD. It just doesn’t boot. As far as I can tell my problem is somewhat unique. I have yet to find someone having exactly the same problem. There are a lot of documented issues out there that are somewhat similar (ie share the blinking dash thing) but most actually make sense and are some sort of easily solvable driver problems.

Either way, I figured out that I take a vid of what is happening so that you guys can see the what is this thing all about. This was taken at approximately 3am in a dark room with my Nikon Coolpix S50 so sorry for the quality. Also, don’t mind the mess on my desk.

The computer usually doesn’t sit on the floor like that. It’s actually tucked in the nifty little “computer shelf” of my desk but I moved it out when I was ripping out all the USB cables from the back hoping this will fix the issue.

And yes, that is a Think Geek binary clock on top of the monitor.

I wiped the drive clean and reinstalled Windows on it today. My machine boots once again. I already transfered my firefox profile from the backup drive so I’m 80% back to normal. Now I will need to slowly install all the little pieces of software that I will need. I’ll probably keep it light this time - this is bound to happen again. I just wonder when - I got 2 months out of it last time around. Let’s see how long can I go this time…

Remember that one time (at band camp) that my computer wouldn’t fucking start, because it was busing blinking a little tiny dash in the upper left corner of the screen? That was the end of December (just before Christmas). You might remember me struggling to find a reasonable solution and finally giving up and re-formating the drive and reinstalling windows.

So I have been running with a fresh Windows for close to 2 months now. Yesterday (actually, technically today at 3am) I rebooted the machine and it never came back up. All I see is that damned blinking dash. And once again I haven’t the faintest clue as to what is really causing this issue. This is really irritating, because now I know it’s not just some random glitch. It happened twice already, and it will probably happen again.

Btw, as far as I can tell, the data on the HD is fine - or at least it was last time. It just wouldn’t boot. I know this is not a corrupted MBR because running FIXBOOT and FIXMBR tools did absolutely nothing last time. Neither did installing windows on the same partition without actually formating the drive which means it is not a Windws problem either.

Could it be software related? It’s possible but it kinda seems unlikely at this point. I have no clue what could have caused it. Last time the machine bricked itself while applying Windows Media Player update. This time around it was rebooting to update McAfee. Then again, I don’t reboot that machine often - it runs continuously for weeks on end. The only time it reboots is when the software forces it too. I haven’t checked the uptime before it went down yesterday but I think it has been running for at least a week. I installed several apps in the last 2 weeks - Bitpim, MS Visual Studio, Flickr Uplodr, ActiveState Perl and some CPAN modules and probably few more things. It could have been any of these.

Or perhaps it is some insidious virus or trojan that went undetected. Perhaps it is sitting there camouflaged in one of my data files, just waiting to pounce and fuck up my boot sequence. It’s possible, but you’d think that a 2 month old piece of mallware would get snagged by the on access scanner made by any mainstream AV provider, no matter how shitty or bloated their software is.

I’m beginning to suspect this might be something like Ben described in one of the previous threads - a perfectly good hard drive with few faulty sectors in the boot area. But then again I ran the quick built in DELL IDE drive diagnostics and they passed. Of course it’s possible that these things gloss over this type of things and wouldn’t notice it. But this is a relatively new drive - I think it only has like a year or so. The data drive is much older, and it is working perfectly fine. Of course that one never was a bootable drive but still.

Perhaps it’s because I have 2 drives sitting virtually on top of each other in the cramped Dell case and the heat and vibration is doing it’s damage over time? I just don’t know. I’m at a loss here. Perhaps this is a sign from above that it is really about time to invest in a new gaming machine…

Since I’m teaching again this semester, so over the holiday break I set up a little website where I could post links, resources and various interactive things that don’t really work well with blackboard. I used my Novell Netdrive account since CORE deleted my unix account few weeks after I got my MS. I never really found out why, but it probably had something to do with a random php script that I wrote my sophomore year. It essentially appended user input to a text file and then displayed the text from that file on the page creating a primitive “blog comments” like effect on some of the pages. Needless to say, at some point it got spammed into oblivion, and being lazy I never really disabled it.

Or it could be the fact that I compiled and installed quite a few apps in my home directory, including a never version of VIM, nmap, netcat and few other security tools that probably freak out sysadmins. When I started teaching I asked if I can have my unix account back once or twice via email but I never got a response. When I arrive on campus these days, the CORE folks are long gone. In fact, everyone except for students and few professors who teach evening classes is gone. I never noticed that when I was a student because I would usually spend a whole day on campus doing research, GA stuff and etc.

Now that I work full time and I can’t get there before 5pm I never really see the administrative and support staff anymore. All communication with the secretarial staff regarding printing teaching materials or obtaining supplies must be done remotely. To be fair, I think there is like one day a week when the Registrar’s office and couple of other important administrative offices on campus are open till like 6pm - but most of the non-faculty inhabitants of MSU vacates their offices at like 4:30. Sigh…

Anyway, I used Netdrive because that’s all I have right now. I used some very simple PHP scripting mainly because I didn’t feel like copying and pasting the header and footer on every single page. Over the holidays I figured out that you can actually enable PHP parsing if you make your .php files executable. Naturally you don’t get shell access to your account, but Netdrive has a very clunky and counter-intuitive web interface. You can use it to make your stuff executable to the world, (but it requires some digging in the “Properties” panel) on a “per file” basis. That’s exactly what I did over the break and everything was working.

I decided to check back on the site today and I noticed that my PHP files were being displayed as text. WTF? I went back to the web interface, and sure enough - all the execute permissions were gone. I set them back, reloaded my page and…

Nothing. My page was still displaying text. At that point I gave up and figured they probably locked it down or something. It wouldn’t be surprising if they removed PHP access from the general netdrive accounts for security reasons.

Fast forward 20 minutes. I went back to the website to see if I can turn it into a static HTML, and lo and behold, it rendered normally importing headers, footers and all the dynamic content. WTF? Perhaps it took a while before the permission changes took effect or something. Or perhaps the text version of the PHP page just got stuck in my cache?

Did anyone else lose the execute permissions on your netdrive files? Is there some sort of a cron-job that resets these things every once in a while or something? Or am I just experiencing some system hiccups?

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.

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?

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:

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.