PCUGR Shareware SIG - April 27,
2002
Rawls Frazier,
Facilitator
rfrazier
Things were really
different this meeting. Instead of the usual eclectic meander through a
range of software, the 7 people at this month's meeting tackled a sick
computer, sharing their knowledge and suggestions as we worked to diagnose
the problem and work on a solution.
The machine in question
belongs to Bob and his trial with it began one day, well before our meeting,
when it refused to start up. Knowing there was a shop in town, he took it
over and, there, the diagnosis was a dead motherboard. This was replaced and
Bob picked up the machine. On the way home Bob though he heard a rattle in
the machine, but, once home, it appeared to boot OK. Well, there were
a few anomalies like extra drive icons. He called the shop. Then sent
someone over. The techd up the machine to discover a loose cable
(the source of the rattle) and that the sound card was missing -
evidently left out when the machine was put back together. (No testing was
done?? No inventory sheet?)
So the machine went back to
the shop and, after a period, Bob picked it up again only this time to discover it
would not boot at all. Back to the shop. After some additional time passed, the word back is "reformat the drive and re-install
Windows". Bob at this point is a) alarmed he will loose all his data
(in spite of a promise that everything will be backed up onto another
machine) and b) by now has little trust in the shop.
Here is where the Shareware
SIG steps in. Before having Bob take the ultimate, potentially data destroying step, we
offer to have a go at his machine. It also serves as an instructive
troubleshooting session for all.
After peering inside the
box, figuring out how everything was bolted together, then hooking up the
machine to the projector so we could all follow along, we set to work. 1st
up, another unconnected cable: the audio line from the CD player to the
sound card. Not critical and nothing to do with the machine's inability to
boot, but another slipped detail from the shop.
Terms and conditions: Media-Sfera.com. The box contained two
physical hard drives. Bob told us that originally the smaller of the two was
the boot device and was divided into 3 partitions. The larger drive had 7
partitions. Booting from a floppy we verified that the two hard disks could
be seen, but the drive letters seemed to be in an odd order. So we next
fired up FDISK and discovered that the larger disk had an active, primary
partition (seen as the C: drive on the system) and an extended partition
with 6 logical drives, E: through I:. The smaller drive also had a active
primary partition, drive D: and an extended partition with 2 logical drives,
J: and K:. Obviously this was backwards from the original set up. Further sleuthing
using the DIR command revealed the operating system was, indeed, not on what
the system was seeing as the C: drive, but rather on the smaller drive, now
being seen as the D: drive.
All this was the
consequence of how the drives were set up as IDE master and slave and the
fact the each physical drive had an active primary partition. The obvious
solution: flip-flop the drives so that the smaller drive was the master and
the larger drive was the slave. It would be nice, at this point, to say, "voila", and the system was fixed. Alas, that was not the case. Now
the BIOS would not even recognize there were any hard drives in the
system.
We then went through the
exercise of starting the machine with each drive alone. When the
large drive was done this way, the BIOS recognized the presence of the drive
while with the small drive, no drive was detected.
IDE stands for
"Integrated Drive Electronics". What that means to you and me is
that the circuitry on the drive contains the drive controller.
When a drive is set as "master", this means its controller is the
one in charge, controlling both the master and the slave drive. Armed with
this knowledge, we could conclude the following:
A) The controller on the
large drive worked OK. With it enabled (i.e., the large drive was the
master), both the large drive and the small drive could be seen by the
system.
B) The controller on the
small drive was kaput - with it enabled no drives could be seen.
C) The large drive,
although it had an active primary partition, was not bootable. The smaller
drive, evidently, was bootable, but could not be accessed to boot from because
of the controller problem. (A question raised itself - was a bad controller
the original problem all along?)
The group's consensus was
to install Win95 on the large hard disk so the machine could boot from it
and then for Bob to get all his data safely backed up. We started the
process, but discovered that the large hard disk had beaucoup errors and
there was not enough time to complete the Scandisk stage, let alone the
install. The machine was packed up for Bob to complete later, now that a
strategy was in hand for the repair.
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The
SIG "doctors" and the patient. Will it live? |
(After the SIG: The
Scandisk sequence of the install took quite awhile to complete. Once done,
the rest of the installation of Win95 went smoothly. Next, a couple of key
items were reinstalled: networking, Quicken and the printer. Finally after a
few more tweaks to get sound working, the system was back in business. All
critical files were found and accessible. Mission accomplished :-)
Before we completely called
it a day, we did discuss a few software items. Steve has a complete program
for next time ready to go and passed out a flyer listing what he had. One
that really intrigued him was an IE add on that does text-to-speech of
selected text on a web page. Something to look forward to.
Rawls also did a quick show
and tell regarding some Power Point tricks while doing a slide show:
Ctrl-P - turn the pointer into a pen and left-click scribble on your slide
using your mouse (very cool)
Ctrl-A - turn off the pen and get the pointer back
E - press the E key to erase scribbling you've done
B - press the B key and instantly blank the presentation to a black screen.
Press B again to toggle back to the slides
W - press the W key for the same thing as the B key but to a white screen.
That was it for the day. Thanks to
Bob for his willingness to subject his sick machine to the group. Thanks to
everyone else for lending a hand in the troubleshooting. And, as always, a big
thanks to Bernie Stepan, for the meeting room, Internet connection and coffee supplies
at RE/MAX Marina, Petaluma. Click on the RE/MAX balloon icon below for
more information about the real estate services available from RE/MAX Marina
in Petaluma!
RE/MAX Marina
775 Baywood Dr. #100
Petaluma, CA
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