I ran my HDD utilities and did a thorough scan of my disk (Seagate Barracuda 200GB SATA), and its physical properties are just fine. A file structure scan turned up critical NTFS errors.

All my hardware appears to be doing fine, though I haven't run an exhaustive memory diagnosis, just a quick one.

But anyway, this box has been rebooted after abnormal shutdown (read: froze up and hard power down) numerous times, and XP hasn't once run chkdsk on startup (I need to address this issue), evidently resulting in more and more corrupt registry, disk files, etc.

so now, I can't boot at all. Not even from CD. I get a "detecting hardware configuration" then black screen and no keyboard response. Interestingly enough, I can power down, unplug my hard drive, and WinXP installer loads normally. Obviously, at this point, I can't initiate recovery console, because there's no hard drive boot sector there to recover.

I even tried booting from a boot disk into WinXP with the same black screen, no-response, results.

I would really like to recover some of the data off of this drive before i end up reformatting and just doing a ground-up install.

12/7/2005 1:03:34 AM

Recovered...I ended up booting up using a complete set of 6 XP SP2 Startup floppies, and running chkdsk from the recovery console.

Back to normal.

But what I'm wondering is why chkdsk doesn't run when we reboot after the system locks up?

Can I set up XP to run it every time I boot up? Just for the fuck of it...

12/7/2005 1:47:16 AM

This shit is getting old...system still locks up outta the blue. I'll be running a memory test for the rest of the night...all three hours of it...

12/7/2005 4:21:09 AM

maybe you can use BartPE....just google that. Ok i will do it for you:

Google linky:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=BartPE

direct linky:

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

12/7/2005 12:30:15 PM

Can you get into the BIOS?

12/7/2005 8:56:15 PM

Yeah, I could. Right up until I reflashed with a BIOS update.

System is more stable now, but I can't get into the BIOS now. I suppose a reflash is in order. Opinions?

I'm actually on this computer right now. This is weird. I haven't unplugged anything (well, I did, but then plugged it all back in so I could pull files offa this one over my LAN), but I didn't plug in my speaker output.

It hasn't frozen yet today on me. I just don't get it. Pop was telling me that it froze numerous times this morning. But it ain't freezing now. What gives?

12/8/2005 4:53:19 PM

sounds like your memory might be bad...how many sticks do you have? 2 of...?

12/8/2005 5:15:07 PM

2 sticks of DDR400 512MB Corsair ValueSelect for a total of 1GB.

I ran a memory diagnostic program for at least 8 hours with no errors reported.

12/8/2005 5:20:48 PM

Does it lock up or restart?

Look at your motherboard and if you have 4 slots or 1 set that's 1 color and a 3rd slot make sure the ram is in the same color. I don't know why but a couple computer I've worked on lately were having issues and I moved the slots they were in and it works fine. I know this doesn't explain much as far as why but it worked.

12/8/2005 5:38:55 PM

Oh...pairing up memory for dual channel access.

This particular board can only take 1, 2, or 4 DIMMs...not 3. Something about the above.

Anyway, no, that's all kosher. Interestingly enough, I've had one freeze up all day today, and that was after I got home and hooked up all my stuff to this box (it's actually our office box)...setting up new peripherals and my USB DSL modem (what a piece of shit).

I'm going to leave this one on for a couple of days and see what symptoms I can reproduce. So far, so good, knock on wood.

Oh, BTW, it locks up. No restart.

12/8/2005 10:55:49 PM