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Well, farewell, my PC...
Sanfam
I like clocks.
in Zocalo v2.0
My computer has eaten itself. Those of you who know me will understand waht that means, and perhaps feel a bit sad. I certainly am. I'm using a fairly crippled copy of XP right now. Nothing much works, and there is nothing installed. And I'm sure that upon the next reboot, I'll be in for a big shock to find out that my backed up files were not.
*sigh*
I am thankful that I was able to pull a lot of data off. I still can't quite pin down what exactly hapepned, but something did, and it caused a lot of damage.
Summary:
I brought my PC home for christmas break on the 19th of December. Left at 7:30, 20 minutes late from the Greater Rochester International Airport. I had my PC in a specially designed box with two inches of padding on each side, and had the hard drives in my backpack, in antistatic bubblewrap, and an antistatic foam bag. Two of them were linked on the HD mount, one is in its own little radiator thingy. I land, I get home, decide to try another fan on the processor. I do not remember what I did with the HDs. They might have been inside the PC after fiddling around with it.
December 21st. I woke up and checked out my PC. Found it was running. It had been running all night and with no processor fan. CPU had broken the 100C mark, or so the bright red screen warned me. Strangely, I smelled no burning or molten metal, as is usually the case. My heatsink is a wonderheatsink. The hard drives are somewhere, but I do not remember where anymore. They might have been in the system, unplugged, or outside the case. Ambient temperature was probably around 60F. Standard morning temperature before the heat comes on. Strange, though. I thought I unplugged it, and turned off the power supply. And the CPU fan was still off.
I disassembled all but the heatsink/processor combination. There was no thermal compound to be found, so I did not want to mess with it. I never got the compound, so I never tried it.
December 26: Installed a TV Card I got for christmas. Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250. Worked fine for a while.
December 29th: Computer stalls in WinTV software and fails to boot into windows. XP has self-destructed.
January 3rd: I find that the corrupt file is D:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM. Found a backup file in D:\WINNT\RESCUE made when system was installed. It restored me to a base configuration, hardware-wise.
Upon rebooting, the system spent six hours in chkdisk. Numerous corrupt files were detected. It should be noted that the PC had not been shut off since the WinTV TV Tuner had been installed, nor turned on until that point, as I was concerned about it after the overheating incident, but a checkout seemed fine.
January 4th, booted into windows, found my main account, Sanfamo, no longer existed. It was corrupt. Dang. Later that day, while fiddling with the TV Tuner again, in the Administrator account, my computer crashed. Reboot, and after another long chkdis, the Administrator account was found to be corrupt. Dang. Again.
I realized the key to the problem must be the tuner card, so I removed the card and let the system reboot. Still corrupt files. They must have been from the card. So I had the system scanning for bad sectors, as well. None. Viruses, none. But my version of antivirus was very obsolete. 2001 edition. I did scan again once I got here and found my 2003 edition of Norton Antivirus.
More will be posted once I get off the phone. :P
*sigh*
I am thankful that I was able to pull a lot of data off. I still can't quite pin down what exactly hapepned, but something did, and it caused a lot of damage.
Summary:
I brought my PC home for christmas break on the 19th of December. Left at 7:30, 20 minutes late from the Greater Rochester International Airport. I had my PC in a specially designed box with two inches of padding on each side, and had the hard drives in my backpack, in antistatic bubblewrap, and an antistatic foam bag. Two of them were linked on the HD mount, one is in its own little radiator thingy. I land, I get home, decide to try another fan on the processor. I do not remember what I did with the HDs. They might have been inside the PC after fiddling around with it.
December 21st. I woke up and checked out my PC. Found it was running. It had been running all night and with no processor fan. CPU had broken the 100C mark, or so the bright red screen warned me. Strangely, I smelled no burning or molten metal, as is usually the case. My heatsink is a wonderheatsink. The hard drives are somewhere, but I do not remember where anymore. They might have been in the system, unplugged, or outside the case. Ambient temperature was probably around 60F. Standard morning temperature before the heat comes on. Strange, though. I thought I unplugged it, and turned off the power supply. And the CPU fan was still off.
I disassembled all but the heatsink/processor combination. There was no thermal compound to be found, so I did not want to mess with it. I never got the compound, so I never tried it.
December 26: Installed a TV Card I got for christmas. Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250. Worked fine for a while.
December 29th: Computer stalls in WinTV software and fails to boot into windows. XP has self-destructed.
January 3rd: I find that the corrupt file is D:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM. Found a backup file in D:\WINNT\RESCUE made when system was installed. It restored me to a base configuration, hardware-wise.
Upon rebooting, the system spent six hours in chkdisk. Numerous corrupt files were detected. It should be noted that the PC had not been shut off since the WinTV TV Tuner had been installed, nor turned on until that point, as I was concerned about it after the overheating incident, but a checkout seemed fine.
January 4th, booted into windows, found my main account, Sanfamo, no longer existed. It was corrupt. Dang. Later that day, while fiddling with the TV Tuner again, in the Administrator account, my computer crashed. Reboot, and after another long chkdis, the Administrator account was found to be corrupt. Dang. Again.
I realized the key to the problem must be the tuner card, so I removed the card and let the system reboot. Still corrupt files. They must have been from the card. So I had the system scanning for bad sectors, as well. None. Viruses, none. But my version of antivirus was very obsolete. 2001 edition. I did scan again once I got here and found my 2003 edition of Norton Antivirus.
More will be posted once I get off the phone. :P
Comments
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[b]May You Live Forever, and The Last Voice You Hear, Be Mine! [/b]
[img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
you all keep on persisting with the dark side.... you get turned into evil twisted persons.. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/biggrin.gif[/img]
My condolences over the loss of your friend. [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/frown.gif[/img]
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[url="http://www.minbari.co.uk/log12.2263/"]Never eat anything bigger than your own head.[/url]
"Nonono...Is not [i]Great[/i] Machine. Is...[i]Not[/i]-so-Great Machine. It make good snow cone though." - Zathras
[b]It had been running all night and with no processor fan. [/b][/quote]
Well that's the cause of the problem, you've screwed the CPU.
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[b]www.aerowebspace.co.uk[/b]
--
Only the insane have strength enough to prosper,
Only those that prosper truly judge what is sane.
[b]My computer has eaten itself. Those of you who know me will understand waht that means, and perhaps feel a bit sad. I certainly am. I'm using a fairly crippled copy of XP right now. Nothing much works, and there is nothing installed. And I'm sure that upon the next reboot, I'll be in for a big shock to find out that my backed up files were not.[/b][/quote]
Sanfam, If you still have the harddrive, and need to get stuff off it that you think is lost, check out GetDataBack by Runtime Software, (www.runtime.org), I used it to get data off an NTFS partition that had completely dissapeared. Its quite possibly the worlds greatest program for data recovery.
[b]Sanfam, my opinion is that you have maybe partially fried either your CPU, motherboard or both ... or are you using a MB with VIA chipset?
I've had Hauppauge stereo TV/FM tuner for two years and I've never had problems with it. There are some known problems with VIA chipsets if I remember correctly, but after what you told about the CPU temperatures it's a f*cking miracle the system still even BOOTS! [img]http://216.15.145.59/mainforums/eek.gif[/img]
Never, ever run a modern PC without a fan + headsink compo unless it's protected against overheating, such as P4 or the Asus C.O.P systems.
[This message has been edited by Freeze (edited 01-13-2003).][/b][/quote]
Heh. It was my intent to not run it without the fan! I just woke up to find it plugged in and running. The strange thing was that there was no cable there last night, and I had not bothered searching as It had no monitor to use with it.
It is indeed a miracle, although it probably hurt me more in the end. I seriously do think my motherboard is the problem now, although the WinTV PVR is apparently based on a different chip than the past cards were, so that just throws another wrench into the works.
Also, I have successfully backed up all data onto the laptop. The nice thing is that all I lack is my music. My videos can be re-created from tape, and most of my music is backed up back home on my mother's system. Anything else is on here or Direct Connect, and will be copied once the new system is working.
I'm also going to be switching to a Pentium 4 this time around. I don't quite know which board i'll use, but I just might end up using the Shuttle SB51G barebones system to start. It's small, it's got some expandability, and hell, it's portable. I could easily bring it back home in a padded dufflebag or small box. My current case weighs in at 69 lbs fully loaded. My old one at 80 or 90, but it had wheels and was made of solid steel. Heh
Alrighty, enough from me. Back to class!