I had a massive house party at my house last Saturday inc 5 DJ’s 2 of whom are major names in the local circuit and I intend to record the whole 18hr show. Last Friday morning I started my PC. About an hour later I returned to my PC and the mouse was not responding.
Reboot.
On completion of the post test I get a DOS message in the top left of my screen ‘Press a key to reboot.
So I do.
I get the same. I’m suspecting HDD but it hasn’t even had a chance to go looking for the OpSys or so it seems. I disconnect the C: drive meaning that there is no available OpSys so I should get a msg sayin No Op Sys Found (Later I discovered that you don’t get this with W2K, but I digress). Same story.
Fortunately I had bought but not installed a new 120Gb Seagate Barracuda HDD only 2 days before and the suspect drive (a 3yr old 13 Gb Quatum fireball) was for OpSys and applications only. My idea was to throw in the new drive and boot from my Win CD.
As I remove the suspected HDD I check the circuit board to find that one of the chip on the circuit board has burnt out!!!! I found a small bubble about half the size of a grain of rice accompanied by some browned connecting wires.
Your jokin aren’t you?
I have a party to organise and a PC to rebuild. I rebuild the PC which involves installing W2K onto the new drive, then copying the 18G across from the existing D drive which I want to become my new C: so the big new one can become the new D:. Now format the old D: and make it C: and install Windows again. Now copy all the data back to this drive and format the new 120G drive as D: before copying all the data back in an orderly fashion. Remove everything but Windows from C: and install only SFP and Soundforge for recording. Perform tweaks including shutting off unnecessary services.
Go to bed.
Wake up and prepare for the party.
Boot the PC to find it hangs at Log on…..
Uh oh!! I turned off one too many services and forgot to test boot. SHIT!
Re-install windows and fortunately I’m back up and running. Girlfriend has looked after the other party prep. (Note to self ‘Buy choclates’) Ready with 10min to spare.
Turned out to be just a test (of my patience) after all……….
