The (Other) End of the Internet

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Ever had one of those days? Yesterday was a whole week’s worth of them, all rolled up into one!

I had a bunch of errands to run in the morning. While I was out, my wife called to tell me that the computer spontaneously rebooted itself while no programs were running and nobody was anywhere near the machine. It then went in to an endless cycle of

• reboot
• load windows
• get almost finished
• reboot
• load windows
• get almost-finished
• repeat

When I finished my errands and got home (an hour and a half later) the machine was still doing “The Boot Dance” as I’m going to call it.

I skipped lunch while trying to get the computer to behave, then had a couple more errands that came up in the afternoon. By the time dinner time arrived, I was more than a little ready for it.

After dinner, I went back to work on the infernal machine. I tried booting from the Windows XP Setup disk and selecting the “Recover” option. This, it turns out, brings up a “recovery console” which looks to me to be a brain-damaged MS-DOS prompt. I say brain-damaged because it only has about 15 or 20 commands available and won’t let me modify an files outside of the C:\windows directory (that,s ‘folder’ for you amateurs).
After giving up on that, I decided to just re-run setup over the top of my existing installation. Everything ran fine, just up until it said that setup would finish in 22 minutes and then the machine rebooted, insisted on running scandisk on drives C:, D:, E:, F:, G:, and H: and then restarted setup from the beginning. This happened FIVE TIMES, with the reboot occurring at the same point and scandisk happening every time.

Finally, I decided that I needed to get away from it before I put my fist through this nice LCD monitor, so I went to bed.

When I got up this morning I decided to try a fresh windows installation, but didn’t want to completely trash my wife’s and my desktop, so I told it to make a secondary installation on drive D:. It got about halfway done and rebooted, ran scandisk on every drive in the house (I think it even scanned my daughters’ laptops!) and restarted setup. When it rebooted again, I said some things I won’t repeat here and decided to format drive C: and start from scratch.

That finally got the computer working.

Fortunately, I have all my pictures, programs, setup files, and really important data on drives other than C:, but my wife and I still get to spend the rest of the afternoon changing passwords that FireFox used to remember and we didn’t.

Sigh.

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