Another Tech-Help Thread

Go go doomworld technicians

Anyway, just today my computer decided to do something rather odd. I was cleaning in my room (all the while watching Day of the Dead on Youtube) when my computer shut off.

Blammo. LCD goes black, and my startup screen comes on like I had just turned it on. My first thought was that my power supply was going bad- my first one was a 6+ year-old hand-me-down from my sister that limited gaming time to about 45+ minutes, so I thought that my comp. didn't have enough juice and shut off. But when I tried booting it up in normal mode (like I used to) all I got was the HD spinning up, spinning down, and then starting back up all over again.

After that, the screen of startup choices (safe mode, ect.) came up. I tried Safe mode, and again the HD spun up, spun down, and then started up the computer again.

I don't think it's a virus. It has done this similar thing twice (both in the last 2 weeks) when I left my computer on for awhile (both over 5 hours) but each time I could start it up as normal. AVG also hasn't found anything of note, other than the registry entry of some Warez I downloaded several months ago. I also haven't visited any websites out of my usual bubble in several weeks.

So my esteemed members of Doomworld- does anyone have any ideas?

Fucked up HD spindle, if you're referring to uneven HD speed, and you can actually hear it copiously spinning up and down. If that's the case, you can pretty much forget booting any OS from that disk: you may only recover its data partially and intermittently, if you're lucky.

Prince of Darkness said:

some Warez I downloaded several months ago.

Heh, proletarian expropriation? :-p

In any case, you're before a purely hardware problem, no viruses, bugs or malware involved here.

You haven't excluded other factors like the PSU or the cabling though -are you still running with said 6 yo PSU or have you changed it? If so, it could also become FUBAR. Do some testing and report back.

Try disconnecting any optical drives, connecting the HD to another power connector, swap to another SATA connector, try a power-on with only the power (not the data) cable attached, and test the PSU's 12V and 5V outputs with a multimeter. If you do not get steady values (not necessarily a round 12.0 or 5.0) but instead they fluctuate all the time, then you have a FUBAR PSU. If the HD behaves OK on some power rails/data channels and not on others, then you have a fucked up PSU and mobo accordingly.

Maes said:

Heh, proletarian expropriation? :-p

Well, I do believe that I should get Homeworld 2 for free :p

Maes said:

Fucked up HD spindle, if you're referring to uneven HD speed, and you can actually hear it copiously spinning up and down. If that's the case, you can pretty much forget booting any OS from that disk: you may only recover its data partially and intermittently, if you're lucky.

Yeah, that's pretty much how it sounds. Each time the shutdown occurs, it will spin up, but then spin down and restart. If the drive is going, it won't be such a bad thing, as I store all my non-OS shit (music, pictures, downloads) on a secondary drive. Hell, all that's on the other one is some other downloaded programs, games, and the OS.

Maes said:

In any case, you're before a purely hardware problem, no viruses, bugs or malware involved here.

That's good to know.

Maes said:

You haven't excluded other factors like the PSU or the cabling though -are you still running with said 6 yo PSU or have you changed it? If so, it could also become FUBAR. Do some testing and report back.

Try disconnecting any optical drives, connecting the HD to another power connector, swap to another SATA connector, try a power-on with only the power (not the data) cable attached, and test the PSU's 12V and 5V outputs with a multimeter. If you do not get steady values (not necessarily a round 12.0 or 5.0) but instead they fluctuate all the time, then you have a FUBAR PSU. If the HD behaves OK on some power rails/data channels and not on others, then you have a fucked up PSU and mobo accordingly.

I'll try looking that stuff up- I should be able to do that with some of the stuff at home.

Given the symptoms with the HDD, I would say that's the culprit (unless the IO controller is faulty).


When's Maes going to start his own 'Ask Maes' tech help forum?

Planky said:

When's Maes going to start his own 'Ask Maes' tech help forum?

Well, if the admins are OK with it, I'm all for it :-p

Imagine an "Ask Maes" subforum here at DW, where all tech question would be redirected. Ofc I'd like Super Jamie to co-mod with me to cover the most Linux-y aspects of tech help.

Planky said:

When's Maes going to start his own 'Ask Maes' tech help forum?

No need to stroke that e-penis any further.

Jodwin said:

No need to stroke that e-penis any further.

Damn. And I thought you enjoyed it :-/

Well, i've got some good news, and some bad news.

The good news is that the OS recognizes the HD, and is trying to boot off of it.

Bad news is that this means I got some virus at some point that slipped through AGV and fucked the OS over.

Tomorrow, I am going to download several of the diagnostic tools for it, with the hopes that my sister can run the HD and motherboard diagnostics though flash drive. This means that, again, I have good and bad news- the good being that I get to learn to fix my own OS issues, the bad is that she might see some of the horrible porn I have downloaded.

Oh, woe is me.

Prince of Darkness said:

Go go doomworld technicians

lol

Prince of Darkness said:

the bad is that she might see some of the horrible porn I have downloaded.

ROFLMAO this reminded me of when I discovered 30 GB of pr0n on the HD of an army computer I was repairing, and I prominently wrote that on the disk itself with a red marker ΧD

How the computer recognizing the drive now mean it was a virus? Are there some steps here we missed? Lots of things can stop Windows from booting. Sometimes it's even the HDD and it's still easily repairable. Viruses usually just wreak havoc once Windows starts; this is so they can make money.

LOL@army pr0n. I got a good laugh when dad found my brother's porn on his computer. He just pointed and laughed at it (Was kinda nasty).

Aliotroph? said:

How the computer recognizing the drive now mean it was a virus? Are there some steps here we missed? Lots of things can stop Windows from booting.

Yup, we must have missed something or the wording is extremely vague because I can't make neither head nor tails out of the initial problem. It could even just be some bad cluster/data connector/dying PSU intermittently messing up with tbe boot process.

Indeed. This is where I'd be digging in the event logs to see if any errors were logged at all. It just doesn't sound like a virus to me. If it is a virus they usually seem to cause BSODs when they crash Windows.

Aliotroph? said:

Indeed. This is where I'd be digging in the event logs to see if any errors were logged at all. It just doesn't sound like a virus to me. If it is a virus they usually seem to cause BSODs when they crash Windows.

The highly catastrophic viruses that caused FAT overwrites and data corruption just for the heck of it are all but gone now (being replaced by more subtle malware and spyware that are considered more profitable), so it's highly unlikely that a modern virus/malware will cause such a disruption. Especially under NT-based windows, BSODs can only be caused by hardware or driver related fuckups, not by pure software bugs like in 9x/Me. Malware usually "just" hijack a few dozen settings, spawn at every boot and generally behave more like rootkits, resource hogs and cause mostly user-level disruption (e.g. restrict/disrupt access to folders, drives, settings etc.) rather than computer-killers.

Then again, it's still perfectly possible to infect a "modern" PC with an oldskool boot sector virus, if you really put some effort into it. In this case, the effects can indeed be OS-breaking on NT-based windows. In theory it's even possible to start Linux from a hard disk with an infected boot sector...now that should be interesting to watch ;-)

I have seen modern viruses do things like that. In pretty much every case it was a rootkit that malfunctioned and caused Windows to spit out BSODs while trying to load some driver or another. Fixing those is usually not fun, if it's even doable.

I rather like the trend towards profitable viruses. Some of them got damn hard to fix, but at least they don't usually fry data. It was fun being paid to pick them apart. It was also fun to watch my friend's dad fall for one of the fake AVs and pay for it.

Aliotroph? said:

I have seen modern viruses do things like that. In pretty much every case it was a rootkit that malfunctioned and caused Windows to spit out BSODs while trying to load some driver or another. Fixing those is usually not fun, if it's even doable[

Well, rootkits are plausible, as they prod directly into the guts of the OS before the OS itself does, and fuck up with services and drivers way more than "normal" trojans, dialers, toolbars, smileys etc. do.

As far as removing them...heh. I'd like to try if a repair-reinstall works on them (the fact that they hide as settings/services/drivers which are normally restored during a repair-reinstall may make them more vulnerable than "normal" malware), but yeah, generally it's tricky stuff.

I take you also work/worked as an IT dungeon grunt at some point? :-p

Aliotroph? said:

Indeed. This is where I'd be digging in the event logs to see if any errors were logged at all. It just doesn't sound like a virus to me. If it is a virus they usually seem to cause BSODs when they crash Windows.

It wasn't a BSOD; it was just a sudden revert to normal startup. I'm only thinking virus because a sudden problem with the HD isn't anywhere normal (especially since the drives are only about a year old) and because I've done a lot of downloading.

Sorry if I was not very descriptive; i'm not computer-literate.

Prince of Darkness said:

It wasn't a BSOD; it was just a sudden revert to normal startup.

Or a BSOD without persistence and auto-reboot: it lasts so little that on some TFT screens it may not be displayed.

Prince of Darkness said:

I'm only thinking virus because a sudden problem with the HD isn't anywhere normal

Many hardware problems manifest themselves suddenly.

In any case, if you can't perform the necessary tests yourself (impossible, if you don't have a multimeter and/or a known good PSU to spare, as well as spare memory, video cards etc.), you'd better take it to a tech (or promise some geek friend of yours that he'll get laid if he fixes it for you or something).

A typical mistake many people do is having BSOD persistence turned off by default, so this way you can't even tell if you're having a BSOD or not, and you don't get to see any driver related error messages.

On the next boot, hit F8 and choose the option about "disabling automatic reboot after a BSOD", and try to read what it actually says. If a specific driver is mentioned (e.g. viamraid.sys or something like that) then at least you can pinpoint the problem somewhere.

If it doesn't mention any particular driver file, then you have bad memory/PSU/some other elementary hardware.

A final tip: if you don't have a multimeter you can watch the PSU voltage through the BIOS. It's not as accurate, but accurate enough to tell you if there are unacceptable fluctuations in PSU voltage: if the voltage drifts too much (especially CPU voltage) then it's FIBAR.

Another important thing to do is opening the computer case and inspecting the motherboard for bulged/busted capacitors (those cylindriical thingies that look like small tin cans). If any of them is anything but flat at the top (bulging, or leaking a brownish shitty liquid) then you have a typical case of bad caps, which usually result in random instability.

Yes, exactly this. Also, if you happen to live in a big enough city, there are often computer stores that will test a PSU for free. Takes them about ten seconds to plug it in and tell you of it's dead. They were quite happy to do this for me because they knew I'd buy another one right away if it was. hehehe

The other thing you can do if you had bluescreens and didn't see them is view them in Windows. If you're on Vista or Windows 7 there will be a "Reliability and Performance Monitor" you can use. Just start typing "reliability" in the start menu and it will appear in the list. One of the tabs it contains will have a graph of your system stability over time and a log of all the different kinds of errors, including BSODs.

If you are on XP you can view the errors by right-clicking "My Computer," choosing "Manage," and then opening the "Event Viewer" in that screen. Things like crashes will appear until "System" and you'll have to open the properties of a message to see any details. The results will be cryptic, but if all else fails you can post a screen of one of those property pages and we might be able to say something useful about it.

This is of course assuming Maes' suggestions don't give you anything. Often in that case, neither will any of the logs in Windows, but you can always have a look. You can find other neat tidbits in there too, like install times for programs and loads of silly info blurbs and warnings.