5 replies to this topic

[WFO]

Boy do I feel like the dumbest noob tonight! Normally I image my drives once or twice a week. I had been in the habit of imaging before any major changes as well. I just haven't been changing much so the last backup was 11/20. Lot's of pictures have been added since. For some reason Outback6 Plus quit recognizing Outlook 2007 as a valid install. I thought the last program update borked it. No bfd. Uninstall/reinstall. Now it won't accept my valid key. Grrr... Uninstall run a reg cleaner and search the registry for all related keys and delete. Reboot and low and behold: "Boot Manager missing. Press Ctrl, Alt delete to reboot." I was dual-booting XP Pro with Vista RC2. Hmmm... I slapped in the XP Pro CD and went to the repair console. I'm also running Raid 0 so this required the floppy. I used fixmbr and fixboot. No joy! Now NTLDR is supposedly missing. I tried a repair with the Vista DVD. No joy again and no restore points either. Harrumph! This was getting embarrassing.
I also tried repairing the MBR Track0 with an Acronis Image. I really didn't want to do a full restore that was 3 weeks old although that would have fixed the problem with OBP6. Next I slapped in a copy of x64 RC2. Fortunately, I already had x64 Raid drivers on a floppy. The install went quick! Once booted in x64 I copied important stuff to an external HD. I had a copy of my original XP Pro Boot.ini saved in "My Documents" sooo I just copied and pasted it to the new Boot.ini. Huzza! After unintentionally trashing my main rig, I was up and dual-booting after 3 hours without losing any data. I will go back to my old imaging habits though. I was sweating for a while.

[simon]

I would say that was some good thinking WTG

[brewin]

Well, a couple days ago I was screwing around with my laptop and had to take it apart. I put it back together and everything seemed to work fine until a few hours later when I started to smell something burning and the computer subsequently shut off. That's when I realized that the CPU fan wasn't spinning and hadn't for 6+ hours. So I took the fan out, plugged it back in and it worked. I then tried to boot into Linux, but couldn't because "the CPU had exceeded the maximum of 95C." I had to let it cool off for an hour just to get it to boot. It still works though.

[banj0]

I'm with Simon, that was some good thinking WFO. If that makes you think you're a newb I'm just a moron.

Dumbest thing I've ever done was taking out my raid0 drives to try out vista on an old IDE. To skip the "searching for array" message these DFI boards throw out, I disabled RAID in the bios.

3 days later, after plugging in my striped sata drives, it took me about an hour of freaking out until I remembered that the reason for no boot was because I'm dumber than a bag of hammers and still had RAID disabled.

[WFO]

It sounds like you got lucky Brewin. That could have been expensive.

Hey Banjo, at least you remembered. The older ya get, the more everyone suffers from CRS.

I got lucky mostly because nothing was on the Vista RC2 build. My wireless card never worked so I never used it. I also have the RTM on another computer. . I kept telling myself that I's buy a new card but never did. If I had a recent Acronis image, I would have been up and running in 15 minutes without jumping through hoops.

[David_Heavey]

Stupidest thing I ever did was two weeks ago when I decided to tidy the wire in my PC again. So off i went, did a great job, went to reboot ... OH S**T ... nothing. Tried the pwer/rst/hdd led cables thinking that had to be it. An hour later I still couldn't get ir to boot. No power to the mainboard. Nothing. that's it, new board i thought. then i relised I never plugged the ATX power connectors into the board.

Moron