Topic: WX Computer Issues

[CNYWeather]

Hey guys. My 2nd wx computer took a dump on me. I notice it had been rebooting
on it's own for a couple of days. Last night when it did, it would not restart.

I've gotten stuck in chkdsk where it will scan the indexes, find things that are orphaned,
and after about 3 tries, it completes chkdsk. I did get it to reboot once and when I tried to
click into system restore, it rebooted.

If I F8 while it boots and try and get to last know good config, it ends up rebooting.
I cant get into safe mode. It hangs after a couple minutes and the screen shows stuff loaded,
along with please wait too. I do hear what seems the hard drive starting and stopping spinning
again and again when it's stuck there. It's a 3 year old box I stole from my kid when he went to college
and use it for my lightning, GRLevel 3 and backcam.

Sound like the drive is bad?
All this after spending 30 minutes at the mother in laws last night. Got a call yesterday...

"Tony, hahaha, you wont believe this, hahaha, but my monitor shows everything upside down, hahaha

I think this is repair number 25 this year for her. LOL
 

[Bushman]

Bad drive or gibbled OS.  Reload and/or replace drive

[CNYWeather]

I kinda figured. Haven't found the rescue disc yet either. 

[Chris H.]

I kinda figured. Haven't found the rescue disc yet either. 

See if you can transfer over everything off the old hard drive onto a new one.

[CNYWeather]

I was gonna try that. I've done it before with WD drives. Saw
a 320GB for $44.99 at Best Buy

EDIT: After a bit of effort I got it to boot and run. I ran a Windows Update,
and lost the screen. Get an out of Range on it.

[CNYWeather]

Well, going from:

Buy a new low end desktop, to get a new HDD and OS,
to a Wireless IP Cam............

Asked my kid who was home for the weekend if he had the Restore DVD
and he said, yeah I have it. So reinstalled Windows and getting everything back
slowly but surely.

[DaculaWeather]

Bummer, I need to re-image mine. I backup all the weather stuff to an external drive but manually make an image of the whole hard drive.

Did you try sticking the drive in the freezer for about 40 minutes? Sounds like it MIGHT help on your drive.

[CNYWeather]

Pretty sure it was a registry or OS issue. It's been running for about 5 hours
now since the reload of windows and it's fine so far. Only got GRLevel 3 going
so far. More tomorrow.

[Randall Kayfes]

Sounds like it could have been a Trojan(s) or a Rootkit(s).  Most Trojans won't survive a reinstall some Rootkits can survive a reinstall...

[CNYWeather]

Didnt my 7 year old (120 in human years) computer at work die today too?

Having a lot of luck. Glad I can fix this stuff. 

[DaculaWeather]

Bermuda Triangle. Run!

[CNYWeather]

that was the first thing I tried. Didnt do anything. Even tried that at home and nothing.

I go there and she's trying to read it all upside down.
She has an LCD. I just flipped it over. She says, "Ooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"   LOL

[DaculaWeather]

Ours are ctrl-alt-page up or page down. Or something like that. I never can remember. We have kids that try to flip them, I pushed out a registry change that disabled the keystrokes. Kids.

[CNYWeather]

Well after all that work, it died while I was at work yesterday. Doing the same
stuff as before so I guess the HD is kaput.

Sucks though. The Gateway Restore CD wont work on a new HD. Back to
square 1. New el-cheapo computer or wireless IP cam.


 

[DaculaWeather]

Mini-itx box I think is the way to go. Cheap and low power consumption.

[CNYWeather]

Never seen those before. Wonder if they are "wife" friendly too?

I need to stream the 2nd cam, run GRLevel 3, and slap the lightning detector
into a PCI slot. I was thinking a LOW cost tower, maybe even a refurb.

Either that or suggestions for a good Wireless Outdoor IP Cam
and no not a Sharx for the time being. LOL

[linuxfreak]

Hey Tony, I'm getting ready to move the station software over to a "new" system I built:

Motherboard: http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D945GCLF2D-Mini-ITX-Motherboard (mine is the D945GCLF2, older  )

EDIT: This one looks even better: http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D525MWV-Mini-ITX-Motherboard for $3 more. 

In a media center case (way too big, but got me backplane openings without using a riser card   )

Old 400W supply ( leftover from my original P4 case, cheaper   )

Seagate 120G 2.5" laptop SATA drive, mounted on a homebrew mounting plate attached to a slot filler plate at back of case, just can't find locally 2.5 to 3.5 adapter rails in town, 3.5 to 5.25, no problems.  

Windows 2k, only sees the Atom as a dual core, XP saw it as a quad core (HT support  ), just checked, W2K is max 2 cpu's   oh well!

Tried it out without extra case fan, draws about 30 watts at idle, with extra fan and Cumulus, VVP and GPSDiag running ~40 watts, about 25% of what the P4 drew idle!!  

I got the motherboard given to me by a friend of my daughter, it was in a 1U rack mount server case, the reason I got it, "it won't run Linux"   I loaded up my VoIP PBX software (Asterisk Linux   ) and it ran!! Had to get the little tinplate backplane plate online, he couldn't find the original.

I'm hoping that the Boltek will work in the single PCI slot, otherwise this project is gonna be a bust.  

See the sceenshot below, I use UltraVNC to monitor the computer, want it to be "headless" when finished, even less power without feeding a mouse and keyboard.  

George

[CNYWeather]

Looks like you've got quite the fun project ahead of you George 

So I left this am with the troublesome computer running chkdsk.
I come home and see the power button flashing. I press it and TA DA,
the damn thing came out of sleep mode and was fine and dandy.

Beats the heck out of me. Maybe if it is running, I can image the drive
and get a new SATA one in there before it screws up yet again.

[mackbig]

I wonder if the "not booting" right before you re-installed OS was a symptom or a cause.

My pc started rebooting a few months ago, it would be up from a few minutes to a few hours.  I could tell because my gr3 can not autostart, so I would get the email that GR3 was not loading, then check the last start time on OS. 

Turned out to be a dead power supply, was probably overheating at various temps.  Swapped out for $40~ish, and 10 minutes of my time.  Worked fine ever since.

Your issue may in fact just be the drive, but its possible all the boots (if caused by PS) could have corrupted something on drive if it kept reseting in mid - boot.   Its a stretch but possible.

Andrew

[CNYWeather]

That could be a possibility. I do have a spare I believe
and maybe I'll swap it out for the heck of it.

Thanks!

[Cienega32]

Have you done a full mem check? I had a bad stick in one machine that gave me the same results.

[CNYWeather]

No Sir. A downloadable program to do that?

The first time it ran chkdsk, it moved some files around, and found some orphaned files.
It ran for around 18 hours and went dead. Will some kind of error log
in Windows tell me what happened when it tried committing suicide?

[Bushman]

I've used a couple of these from time to time.  http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/tp/memorytest.htm

[CNYWeather]

Thanks! 

[Cienega32]

I found my bad mem by chance. I was shuffling a ton a files across drives and had errors, corruption, resets and chkdsk launches - problems galore that worsened. My first lookey was at the P/S because of the random resets and the general heat at the time. I knew the drives were good so I went to the mem. Pulled one stick at a time and with one had no more problems other than a bunch of now-corrupt files. Replaced that "matched set" with another and never looked back.

I never did get to use any mem-checkers.