What on earth just happened!?!?? HELP!

M

meauounji

n00b
Joined
Oct 16, 2004
Messages
49
Okay, I'm in kind of a bind and need some expert advice fast, hoping some of you [H]ard gurus can help. Let me tell you what happened.

I have a computer that I buit, e6400 @ 3.2ghz on Gigabyte's DS3 (p965) running Vista 32bit. Been running it for over 2 months with little issues, definitely nothing major... but then....

Today, I got a new monitor, dell 2407wfp, which has a card reader in it. I plugged the monitor up, and I was doing the things I do on the computer, nothing crazy, a little bit of gaming, a little bit of photo editing, a little bit of the internet, a little bit of dvd watching, whatever. In the mean time, Vista installed the drivers for the cardreader and asked me for a restart. It also installed an update, which I assumed was the animated cursor security patch that came out today. Anyway, after about an hour, I was done. I went and hit the 'pearl' (yeah...) to shut down, and away it went. Here's where the weirdness begins.

Before Vista shut down, it went through the 'Installing updates 1 of 1, do not turn off or reset' routine, which took MUCH longer than normal, but deciding to trust the disclaimer on the screen, I left the machine alone and went to get a drink and came back to find the machine had turned off. Finally, I thought to myself. I hit the power button to turn it back on, and windows won't boot. It went through the POST sequence fine, but after the 'scrolling startup bar' goes away, nothing... I hit reset, chose 'start windows from last known good configuration' from the boot error menu (the one that comes on if the machine shut off if windows doesn't boot all the way) and then... same thing. Okay, I thought to myself, then went into bios to switch the settings to 'load optimized' just to eliminate bios settings as a possibility, and tried again (so now I'm back to 2.13ghz) After a few more times of fiddling around, I got into windows, where explorer keeps crashing on me, I noticed that the updates were still being listed as available to install, I downloaded them and shutdown the machine again, WITHOUT installing the update this time... Ready for this? Now I can't get into windows at all! No Safe mode, no nothing! In fact, now the post sequence is ending with 'no operating system' like when you tried to boot from a blank harddrive! Worst yet, sometimes, the machine will get stuck at POST!!!

Here's what I've tried: Removing the pairs of memory (I have 4 sticks), switching the slots on the memory, didn't help. I tried removing any non necessary components, like dvd drives, then Hard drive to see if it would at least finish POSTing. Well, here's where I'm getting something. Without the hard drive, the machine would finish posting every time. Now, I can't go much further without a harddrive, so I had to plug it back in, but I put it in a different SATA port. Now the machine appears to be POSTing reliably. I booted from my Vista DVD (I think it's a dvd), to try to repair the install, but get this, Vista is saying that there is no Vista currently installed! Okay, so repair is out of the question, then I tried reinstalling, now it's saying that 'the volume does not meet the criterias required by windows' GAAH!! I don't want to have to reformat, there are valueble data in there that, although won't ruin my life it it goes away, will make it much more difficult in the coming months, so i'd like to keep that as an absolutely last resort.

I know I practically wrote a book telling you guys about my problem, so if you read this far down, thanks. I just wanted to be thorough. Anyway. if anyone has any idea what I can do to fix this, I would really, really, really, appreciate it!

Thanks!

Art
 
I have no idea but I hope you get that fixed, best of luck to you.
 
meauounji said:
which I assumed was the animated cursor security patch that came out today
Click to expand...
That flaw is only a problem with IE7 under XP ;)

I went and hit the 'pearl' (yeah...) to shut down
Click to expand...
Its still called the Start Button, FWIW.

You said you "fiddled" in BIOS and now it can't find an OS. Did you mess with your boot sequence? You're going to have to tell us what your boot sequence is and what else you "fiddled" with.

I have noticed Vista messes with the display quite a bit. At logon is one. I am thinking with the new drivers- it wasn't displaying the logon screen correctly. What I am saying- is Vista may have actually booted- the display just wasn't right (the first time it happened).

Safe Mode won't work? What kind of problems do you get?

With all this BIOS talk, I would personally feel alot better if you reset your BIOS to factory settings, and give it a try.
 
1. unplug card reader and leave it unplugged when booting..
if problem persists
2. return your bios settings to what you had them at before messing with them..
if problem persists
3. run disk diagnostic utility that came on a cd with hard drive or down load it from hd manufacturers web site, to make sure the hard drive is still good..
if problem persists and disk is still good
4. re-install windows..
 
GORANKAR said:
1. unplug card reader and leave it unplugged when booting..
if problem persists
2. run disk diagnostic utility that came on a cd with hard drive or down load it from hd manufacturers web site, to make sure the hard drive is still good..
if problem persists and disk is still good
3. re-install windows..
Click to expand...

Actually that would be taking the easy way out. When it isn't your data- it's pretty easy to say, isn't it??? Plus, the reader is in the monitor itself- you can't "unplug" it.

I suspect a bad hard drive as well though. Which is why I would like you to reset all the stuff you "fiddled" with, by setting everything back to factory default. This would at least tell you if the hard drive can be booted with normal settings.
 
zacdl said:
Actually that would be taking the easy way out. When it isn't your data- it's pretty easy to say, isn't it??? Plus, the reader is in the monitor itself- you can't "unplug" it.

I suspect a bad hard drive as well though. Which is why I would like you to reset all the stuff you "fiddled" with, by setting everything back to factory default. This would at least tell you if the hard drive can be booted with normal settings.
Click to expand...


The card readers that are built into to some monitors are usually plugged into a usb port.. The one built into mine is, in any case.. So unplugging it from the pc is rather easy.. The one on mine causes booting issues when I leave it plugged in.. Never really researched why, since I don't use the reader.. Just know the boot failures stopped as soon as I unplugged the thing and come back when I plug it back in..
I suppose I should have advised attempting to recover any needful data prior to attempting a re-install.. I often, incorrectly, assume people backup their important data.. My apologies..

Coincidental HD failure crossed my mind also, hence the earlier recommendation of running a check on it....
 
GORANKAR said:
The card readers that are built into to some monitors are usually plugged into a usb port.. The one built into mine is, in any case.. So unplugging it from the pc is rather easy..
Click to expand...
True, but some don't go through the PC- they are just there to display it on the screen. I don't know which this monitor does- but I do know it is built-in.
 
Thanks guys, for all the replies thus far.

Regarding the BIOS; when I say fiddled, the only thing I did was switched between 'load optimized default' and my saved overclocked setting which, as I said, has worked for over two months.

As far as boot order; default is HDD, of course, I forced it to go to the DVD drive when I booted it from the Vista DVD (Home premium, by the way)

The card reader can indeed be unplugged. I have done so until I can eliminate it as a possible cause.

From here, I think I might try the disk check utility GORANKAR mentioned, it is a western digital, OEM, however, so I will have to go find a utility from their website. I might go ahead and purchase a second HDD just in case, and to have a backup against something like this in the future.

Thanks again, I'll keep you guys posted.
 
The Dell 2407WFP does in fact use a USB connection for the card reader that is built in, so unpluging the usb to the monitor will disable the card reader.
I've never had any problem with mine (monitor), but then again my whole Vista experience has been completely trouble free.
Edit: if you can find a copy of the "ultimate Boot Disk" or "Hiren's Boot CD", they both have file managers on them that will allow you to get at your data
and move it to a different partition, or a second drive .
 
Re-installing windows without formatting the drive will also allow you to gain access to your data as a last resort.
 
...have you ever had one of those really, really big 'duh' moments?


see? what happened was...


I unplugged the card reader and, voila! It came up... upon further examination in the BIOS, when it says HDD as an option in the boot sequence, there was apparently a submenu that I could go into to CHOOSE BETWEEN ANY FLASH READERS AND HDDS!!!!111!1! ...yeah...

Well, if you're curious, now I'm dealing with a whole new set of problems. You see, when I had tried to reinstall/repair windows earlier, it apparently took out a fair chunk of what makes windows work... namely.... explorer. No you didn't misread that. I've never seen this before myself, but when I boot (successfully, I might add) into windows, all I get is a black screen and a cursor. The task manager is accessible with ctrl-shift-esc, and I still can get to the ctrl-alt-del menu, but I can't access any of the files because there IS no file explorer. It's rather surreal, like a Microsoft twilight zone.

At this point, I've tried going back into the Vista DVD during boot, then selecting repair (which it actually allows me to choose this time), once into "windows", if you could call it that, the HDD activity light blink along with the 'hourglass circle' appearing next to the cursor for a few minutes then it dies down. It has presented me with a 'these changes can only be applied after a restart' dialogue at least once, so I'm hoping that the blinking light and the hourglass means it's actually doing something to fix itself.

I've pretty much ruled out hardware failure as a possibility, and am now just trying to fix my own dorky mistakes. I think the data is going to be okay. Thanks for hanging with me, hope you enjoyed the read.

Art
 
It happens. Sometimes you can over-think it.
I bet now you will start checking for stuff like that, eh? Just something you learn by mistakes.
 
Just to wrap things up, here's what I ended up doing to fix the problem. It was kinda unusual, so I thought I'd post it just in case someone ever ran into something similar to mine.

I was in the 'twilight zone', as in that black screen with a task manager I talked about earlier. I put in the vista dvd, nothing happened. I hit run in the task manager and found setup.exe from the dvd. Once I ran setup.exe, the installation screen for Vista came up without any option to repair... BUT when I hit install, what it does allow me to do is UPGRADE the current installation of Vista Home Premium to... Vista Home Premium! I said, well, what the hey! I did the 'upgrade' (which took over an hour for some reason) and everything seems okay until I got to the activation screen.

Now this is the part I kinda wanted to get to because it might help some other people running Vista OEM. Windows is now telling me that my copy of the software is not genuine, and that I must activate... makes sense doesn't it? Anyway, I have no internet connection, for some wacky reason, so I had to call by phone. Now, there is an automated system that it gave me the phone number for, where I was able to punch in the hardware ID, and get a new activation code no problem. From there, I was able to go into windows, and finally, everything was okay again. My user profile was still there, my files were still there, my programs all register as installed, etc.

So that's how it ended, crisis averted! Yeah!
 
Now that was preeeeetty damn wierd!!! Do you live near the Bermuda Triangle by any chance :D Seriously, thanks for posting the "FIX".
 
Can you hit ctrl+alt+del and go to file -> new task and have it run explorer.exe? I've never used Vista, but that's how it works in XP.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top