What Am I Doing to Kill my Computers?

[kevin_standlee]

I have had yet another Dell laptop stop booting on me. It passes POST and displays a black screen with a cursor (you can often see that for just a moment just before a normal boot) and that is all. This has happened to me a lot for some reason, on multiple computers. I wish I could figure out what causes it, because it's not just a single computer or the same hard drive or anything like that. The only thing that seems to be in common between the machines is me!

Now in this case I have a clone of the drive from 20 days ago to which I can restore, eventually. The non-booting drive can be read, as usual; it just won't boot. I can't run FIXBOOT on it (in case that somehow was the problem because I've just discovered, the hard way, that this computer (which I bought secondhand) has an Administrator password on Windows, and I don't know what it is. (It's likely whoever sold it didn't know either.) So I can't run the Repair console on a WinXP CD-ROM.

I find it hard to believe that this is viral in nature because it's happened so many times, but I'm running anti-virus scans on the non-booting drive now. The backup has already passed. Because the backup drive is 20 days old, as soon as I booted it (leaving it connected to the internet) it wanted to install lots of updates, so I need to wait for it to be done with that as well before I start moving the data from the non-booting drive to booting one. What I guess I need to do also is to go buy another 320 GB IDE drive so that I can have two clone backups at once, because right now I can't make another clone of the booting drive without overwriting the drive that was working just fine this morning.

Comments

[twilight2000.livejournal.com]

While it's tempting to say "You're not using Macs!" - the real answer is likely that you push your computers pretty hard with all that modeling... Or... you just have a weird magnetic field - ask Jillian about killing computers...

[travelswithkuma.livejournal.com]

Bears says don'ts wears boots. Fishes hears yous comings withs boots

[jcbemis.livejournal.com]

my sony vaio notebook had started having a flakey boot problem just after finding and isolating a virus - turns out it was an unrelated motherboard hardware problem. took me months to find the warranty receipt to take it back to geek squad, and took them about 2 weeks to diagnose it and send it back to warranty repair, but I now have a new motherboard in the box.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine - DJ, who Kevin knows - went through a bunch of different components and couldn't keep this one computer running as something was always dying. Eventually he realized it had a bad power supply, which was frying other parts of the machine.

Sadly, no such solution arises for Kevin, who kills multiple computers. Lisa has similar problems. I've wondered if it's connected with his flying, but I don't know enough others who rack up lots of air miles to make a informed guess. If it were connected with his software, presumably others in his company would also be killing laptops (which may be the case). It's a mystery all right.

[purpleranger.livejournal.com]

You know, this could have been a recurring gag on Chuck.

[fcmoulton.livejournal.com]

My background is in *nix not Windows but if this was happening to me what I would do is get a USB drive with a live OS (such as Knoppix or Ubuntu) and when the machine is running fine get MD5 checksum for each of the critical boot files. Then if there is a boot problem later just boot from the USB and you can check the MD5 checksum to see if one of the files has changed. You could also just keep copies of critical files on the USB drive.

[chocolatescifi.livejournal.com]

I think I know what your problem is, Kevin:

"Dude, you got a Dell!"