I killed my PC

[Nick Leeson]

I'm gutted. After bragging relentlessly about never getting spyware or my PC never crashing, slowing down and not having had to reinstall since I built it 3 years ago. I managed to kill it yesterday.

I installed a crack for something that I should have ran in a sandbox but I was in a rush and I knew straight away it had riddled my PC. Spent 3 hours cleaning it all out and finally got rid of everything.

Unfortunately, in fixing it it seems I've maybe either corrupted a start-up program or a driver because the PC will only start up in safe mode.


Bad thing is because it's been so long since my last installation I'm going to have a lot to back up and secure before I can format the system drive.

It's going to be a full days work which I really can't be arsed with, or have the time for right now. I'll give it one last try in trying to get it to start up in normal mode but it isn't even displaying the BSOD for anything more than a fraction of a second so I can't even see what the error is.

I did remove the display drivers as BSODs on start-up are often due to corrupt display drivers in my experience but it made no difference.

Any suggestions from my fellow nerds before I have to perform a re-installation?

[coop]

If running XP can you not just do a sys restore to before you installed the crack.

[Nick Leeson]

For some reason there's no restore points. System restore was turned on but I think I might have fucked with the clock a few times while running certain apps in trial mode which screwed up the system restore calendar.

[Uncle_Meat]

Another common startup BSOD is "Inacessible Boot Device", relating to your IDE/SATA drivers.

You can kill any suspect drivers/services with your XP install CD.

Choose "Recovery Console" upon booting from the CD.

Once in the console, issue the command LISTSVC. This will show all services/drivers starting up alongside windows. They'll be described as BOOT/ENABLED/MANUAL/DISABLED and so on.

Find the ones that look a bit milky and then use the DISABLE command, along with the service/driver name to alter. It'll tell you the current state "SERVICE_BOOT_START", for example before it disables it, so you can note down the existing state of the driver/service in case you need to reenable it using the ENABLE command.

Hope that makes sense, in a hurry here!

[Nick Leeson]

Sweet! Cheers, Meat! I'll take a crack at that before I start taking the walls down.

[Gav]

That actually worked for me a few months ago .That Win XP utility is a handy gadget

[Spy Bee]

Take it you tried 'last known good config' you big gay mong?

[Nick Leeson]

I had tried last known config but it just resulted in a black screen. I never reinstalled properly just ran windows as an update which appeared to fix the conflict which I now know was chipset drivers as I got lumbered in VgaSave hell after the upgrade, it totally fucked off my graphics card and wouldn't let me install now drivers as it didn'ty even recognise I had a card in there.

Replacing the Hyperions did the trick though. Thanks Via. Dumbass.

[Nick Leeson]

I would have repped on this thread but you were all completely useless and not one word of advice went anyway to helping me out with an answer so screw you all.

[dave u]

Buy a mac.

[Nick Leeson]

I would but I need a computer to do more than paint pictures.

[real red]

Can you install windows again, into a different directory, before you wipe the disk? I did that myself once purely because I didn't want to lose all the "My Documents" type stuff that I couldn't get to thanks to a stupid problem.

I can't remember how but you can set it up so you have an option at boot-up for which one you boot into (it might ask you as you install in fact) and then maybe you can download some more utilities (ones that don't work in safe mode) to see just what is wrong with the little git.

Also this way you won't lose stuff saved in places like "My Documents" on the current version.

[Nick Leeson]

Cheers rr but it's all fixed up now. I just ran windows upgrade.