Sunday, November 30, 2008
blog
Yesterday, while playing dota, my comp shut down suddenly. It happened today again. I know it's because of the graphics card cos the colour recently is kinda off. It was confirmed when I removed it and the computer could boot it.
Deciding that I can afford to wait 2 weeks until commissioning before getting a new graphics card, I stuck it back into the motherboard (mobo) and started using the computer. 10 minutes into using the computer, it shut down again. At this point, I was already fed up so I just removed the card and used another card which doesn't work normally. Despite disabling onboard graphics, the second card still refuses to work. Defeated, I turned to the onboard graphics. It was then I saw this message while booting up:
DISK BOOT FAILURE - INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
To anyone, this is already a bad sign. To someone like me who builds and repairs his own computer, this is a sign of impending doom. After all, the worst case possible for this is a failed hard drive, not a good sign at all.
Hence, 2 hours plus of troubleshooting began. I tried taking out the mobo's battery to reset the BIOS but to no avail. Next, I swapped the hard disk's power supply with the cd-rom driver (which work last time) but again not response. Changing the connecting cables didn't work either.
It was already pretty bleak at this point in time. I then decided to stick my Windows XP installation cd to see what I can salvage from the hard drive. First up was checkdisk to repair whatever bad sectors and see what data could be salvaged from those sudden shutdowns. Then, I tried to edit and rebuild the boot list. Wasn't sure of the steps though and no positive results were yielded.
However, when restarting, I realised the message changed. "NTLDR missing. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart".
It must have been a corrupted boot sector.
After isolating this problem, it took less than 5 mintues for me to rebuild the boot sector, restart and install the onboard graphics.
Total time taken: 2 hours 49 mins (1459 to 1748)
It was a big round but at least I know that my graphics card needs to be replaced. It was problematic last time but somehow for the past 6 months it was all right. Until now. Time to go Sim Lim to shop around for a stop-gap solution until I get a new comp around mid-2009.
A total waste of my (valuable bookout) time.
At least I managed to clean my all-too-dusty fan in the meantime.
Wallpaper for the past 2 weeks and possible the next 2 weeks as well. Won't be changing it until commissioning I think.
shermon blogged @ 6:01 pm
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Wallpaper for the past 2 weeks and possible the next 2 weeks as well. Won't be changing it until commissioning I think.