PC Problems

[CherylB]

Calling all techies .... your assistance is needed!

My week has been heading downhill from Monday. I came home today in a less-than-enthusiastic mood (considering tomorrow is Friday), only to have my PC completely refuse to boot! After a number of attempts, I booted from the Windows CD, and was thwarted by an incorrect Admin password at the recovery console stage - twice! Couldn't be bothered having three more failed attempts, so out of desperation, I booted again "normally". Fortunately, this time, it worked.

However, I'm living on borrowed time. My PC has been displaying erratic behaviour in a number of respects recently, and I think I only have a limited amount of time to do "something".

So, this is where I need some assistance.

• I've checked my C: drive and it badly needs a defrag - so, when I go to bed tonight, I'll be kicking that off
• Obviously, I need to do some backups - fortunately (maybe) most of my data is NOT on the C: drive, so if it's a disk drive problem and it crashes, it's not catastrophic
• How do I check the integrity of my C: drive these days? Used to be fdisk in the DOS old days (showing my age here!)
• How do I go about determining if it is actually the disk drive or it's another issue?
• How do I find out what my "Administrator" password is? - when as far as I'm aware, "I" am the administrator (BTW - I have XP Professional installed)
• What else can I do/look at before it all comes to a grinding halt?

Hoping there's someone out there who can help me stay connected to AusPhotography!

[Invictus]

Calling all techies .... your assistance is needed!

My week has been heading downhill from Monday. I came home today in a less-than-enthusiastic mood (considering tomorrow is Friday), only to have my PC completely refuse to boot! After a number of attempts, I booted from the Windows CD, and was thwarted by an incorrect Admin password at the recovery console stage - twice! Couldn't be bothered having three more failed attempts, so out of desperation, I booted again "normally". Fortunately, this time, it worked.

However, I'm living on borrowed time. My PC has been displaying erratic behaviour in a number of respects recently, and I think I only have a limited amount of time to do "something".

So, this is where I need some assistance.

• I've checked my C: drive and it badly needs a defrag - so, when I go to bed tonight, I'll be kicking that off
• Obviously, I need to do some backups - fortunately (maybe) most of my data is NOT on the C: drive, so if it's a disk drive problem and it crashes, it's not catastrophic
• How do I check the integrity of my C: drive these days? Used to be fdisk in the DOS old days (showing my age here!)
• How do I go about determining if it is actually the disk drive or it's another issue?
• How do I find out what my "Administrator" password is? - when as far as I'm aware, "I" am the administrator (BTW - I have XP Professional installed)
• What else can I do/look at before it all comes to a grinding halt?

Hoping there's someone out there who can help me stay connected to AusPhotography!

Hi Cheryl,
A pc that boots intermittently, or starts windows intermittently can stem from a variety of causes.
When you say it doesn't start, do the power light on the case/tower come on? Does anything actually show on the screen? Do you hear any beeps after pressing the power button? There's a list of questions I would have to ask to narrow it down to make any guesses.
It could be the hardware - hard drive, RAM, power supply, motherboard : Any one of those components being faulty can give intermittent bootups or windows startups. Or it could be software or OS related.
I would firmly suggest backing up any or all data on the system that you can, and have a technician troubleshoot the faults.

Re: Administrator account/login - this is a reserved account that is created automatically when installing XP. Generally the primary account will be of an Administrator level, but won't be the actual Administrator user/login. If it hasn't a blank password, then it will have a password that was created/set (generally) when XP was installed.
If XP can be started, a tech (worth his salt) will be able to retrieve that password very easily. If XP can't be started, a tech can reset/blank the password in a few short steps.

Unfortunately without knowing more about the symptoms, it can very be difficult to diagnose.
While it may be possible to troubleshoot via messages online, its not as accurate, quick or reliable. So my recommendation would be to have a technician service it properly.

Cheers,

[ricktas]

rather than fdisk. try the chkdsk command in your dos prompt. If you need to know what switches, at the dos prompt type Help chkdsk and it will give you a summary of all the options

[GlennSan]

[*]Obviously, I need to do some backups - fortunately (maybe) most of my data is NOT on the C: drive, so if it's a disk drive problem and it crashes, it's not catastrophic

What Matt said basically but one extra note - from what you posted it sounds like your data is on a different drive. Do you have more than one physical hard disk? I ask because if you have C: and D: and maybe other partitions on one PHYSICAL drive, then if that one physical drive croaks, you'll lose it all.

Hopefully you have backups in place to DVD's, USB keys, external USB drive or something. Losing data when a drive dies is very painful if you don't have backups. I've seen this over and over in my line of work (IT)

[Invictus]

What Matt said basically but one extra note - from what you posted it sounds like your data is on a different drive. Do you have more than one physical hard disk? I ask because if you have C: and D: and maybe other partitions on one PHYSICAL drive, then if that one physical drive croaks, you'll lose it all.

Hopefully you have backups in place to DVD's, USB keys, external USB drive or something. Losing data when a drive dies is very painful if you don't have backups. I've seen this over and over in my line of work (IT)

Nicely said Glen. A multi-partitioned drive crossed my mind as well as a configuration possibility.

One analogy I use regularly with clients about hardware failures: Electronics are just like a light bulb, you never know when it's going to blow, regardless of how new it is.

[GlennSan]

One analogy I use regularly with clients about hardware failures: Electronics are just like a light bulb, you never know when it's going to blow, regardless of how new it is.

I long ago left behind the delights of end-user support as a job role. Now I work in very large scale global server infrastructure but I use a very similar analogy. I call my team the electricity and sewage dept. Nobody knows or cares about what we do as long as it all works. But EVERYBODY wants a piece of us when something breaks...

[ving]

download and install HDD health (bottom of page) to check the health of your HDD.

http://www.panterasoft.com/

[CherylB]

Thank you all for your assistance. Luckily, I didn't have any problems booting today.

I ran the defrag last night - after removing some files because I had less than 15% free space on my C: drive .... seems I didn't quite have all my data files on another drive!! Anyway, defrag ran successfully, so that's one thing out of the way.

rather than fdisk. try the chkdsk command in your dos prompt. If you need to know what switches, at the dos prompt type Help chkdsk and it will give you a summary of all the options

Seems chkdsk is reporting some errors! It said it was deleting some index entries while running, then when finished said "Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode". So, I'll do the /f option later!

What Matt said basically but one extra note - from what you posted it sounds like your data is on a different drive. Do you have more than one physical hard disk? I ask because if you have C: and D: and maybe other partitions on one PHYSICAL drive, then if that one physical drive croaks, you'll lose it all.

Different physical drives! I do actually have C: partitioned, but the second partition is not currently used. D: and E: are my CD and DVD drives, F: is my internal second disk, and G: is my external disk. I also have my sister's laptop on the network!

...
Re: Administrator account/login - this is a reserved account that is created automatically when installing XP. Generally the primary account will be of an Administrator level, but won't be the actual Administrator user/login. If it hasn't a blank password, then it will have a password that was created/set (generally) when XP was installed.
If XP can be started, a tech (worth his salt) will be able to retrieve that password very easily. If XP can't be started, a tech can reset/blank the password in a few short steps.

So now I'm back in, how do I find out what this is? It definitely isn't blank!

Finally, David - thanks for the HDD link. Installed and showing the following, which probably isn't the greatest!

[CherylB]

Bit of an update on this ...

Hard drive (C: ) has been heading downwards (down to 48% now), so I'm not overly optimistic about the long term life of this drive. Rather than wait till the bitter end, I've been out and bought a new laptop ( ), so once I've transferred everything across, I'm planning on turning the PC into a server for my home network (eg. have the printers hanging off this rather than attached to a PC). I'll set the larger drive up as the system disk, reformat what is currently the C: drive (not big I know but just a "bit" of extra space) and then see how I go.