[drgnlvr]

*sigh*

One month...just one lousy, stinking, putrid MONTH my computer ran fine. >.<

Last month, my Hard Drive was WIPED by some virus that Norton actually missed. Zapped, killed, all data lost. Including Six. Thousand. MP3s!

And what happens? It does it again, last night!!!!


So, on to the troubleshooting that I am starting to become an unwilling expert at. It started out simple enough. The computer locked up tighter than a drum. I had to hardboot it. And when it starts to come back up? I get this lovely little DOS window saying "Invalid System Disk".

ARRRRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!

So, tried all the possible combinations of trying to restore that damn thing. Oh, no! That little blinking cursor on that plain black screen just blinks menacingly at me, and mulishly refuses to do what I want.

So, it's the fdisk, and reformat. Then change out keyboards to install the OS (for some reason the WinXP installation refuses to acknolege the keyboard we usually use), then install the drivers for the motherboard, and the harddrive, and then Sam tries to reinstall his Evercrack, and keeps getting the .dll error. He needs DirectX to play. So he keeps downloading and installing the DirectX, and -STILL- gets the .dll error, which means, uninstalling the game and the DirectX, and tryng a different way. It took 4 hours of trying this over and over again (and isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results?), when it occurred to me to ask him if he'd gone to Microsoft and installed all the updates, first. He hadn't. He did. The game installed just fine. >.<

But I still had no sound.

When he finally let me back on the 'puter, I asked him if he installed -ALL- the software for the motherboard. He apparently hadn't.

I did.

Guess what? The DirectX was in the drivers for the motherboard (for the video and sound cards).

Guess who just set up a special "reformat" pack, with step-by-steps of installation, in the order it needs to be installed? :P

(Sam's actually normally a very calm guy, and a damn good tech....except when it's "his" computer that goes tits-up...and I learned long ago, growing up around car guys...its better to just stay the hell out of the way for the most part)

Anyhow, I'm fixed. For the most part.

Oh, and the cause, this time? Microsoft's New Spyware scan. I've used Spybot and AdAware for ages, and never had a problem with either of them...they even play well together, now. And as long as we don't forget to keep the live update on Norton running, we don't have a problem with virii (okay, ONE time...we disabled it for some maintenance and forgot to turn it back on).

But the new MS spyware scan doesn't play well at all. We found this out on our own, and later on today, a freind mentioned that several other people he knows had the same problem.

Well, since Spybot and AdAware are a known quantity, and the MS Spyware scan wants to play in my sandbox all by itself...guess what's NOT being invited back?

And I'm off tomorrow to get a spindle of CDRWs. Fuck backing up every 6 months (which is what all the other techies say is just fine). It's going to be once a month...if not more often.