July 27, 2004
Please Don’t Die On Me
My oldest PC is a 1997 Gateway Pentium II. Its a relic at this point but a very important one. It runs all my Orion development software. I couldn’t rebuild a new system with all the same software if I tried. Don’t have all the original media anymore (can’t find it) and couldn’t get all the patches. So when it is in trouble, I have to fix it ASAP!
Last Friday, we had a power outage. The machine is on a UPS but it had trouble going down and then the UPS battery ran out. Anyway, when it came back up the hard drive was making a wicked sound. It actually does this from time to time and runs just fine but it had me worried. Is this the end?
The symptom was that the machine would boot up and just when it finished showing the loading Windows 2000 screen and before it showed the actual Windows login screen, it would flash something blue on the screen and then reboot. It continued this cycle over and over again.
Now what? I tried to boot into safe mode. Same thing. I restored last known configuration. Same thing. I tried every other Windows startup menu item. Same thing. Nothing would work.
Then I enabled boot logging and figured that would tell me. But how do you get the boot log? I made a MS-DOS boot disk via a quick floppy format but soon remembered that an MS-DOS boot disk does not allow you to see your NTFS drives. Drat!
I did some searching and ran across this freeware utility called NTFS Reader. How nice. So I booted that up from a floppy and was able to get the boot log….and it didn’t show anything was wrong. It reported success! So that meant that the problem was after the boot up. Darn it.
I wonder what that blue screen says…but its so fast…I have an idea. I got out the camcorder and recorded my screen during the bootup. After the blue screen flashed by, I imported the video into one of my other machines and went frame by frame so I could see what it said. I had to toggle quickly between 2 frames but I could see that it said it couldn’t read user32.dll. Um, that is a pretty important file. No wonder the machine isn’t happy.
So I went back in with NTFS Reader and saw that the file was there. It must be corrupted or there must be some other disk problem. Now the problem is that nobody out there gives away any free NTFS writing software. Too much value there. Couldn’t find anything that was cheap to download either. So I need something else.
Some more searching lead me to BartPE. This program allows you to build a bootable CD-ROM that houses a “mini” version of Windows on it. So I built a CD, popped it in, and it came up. BartPE has a Windows Explorer-like application on it so you can browse, copy, and delete files as you need to. I copied over a new version of user32.dll and rebooted the system. Good news…it started right up! All set. BartPE rules. I encourage you to build a BartPE CD to have lying around…especially if you only have 1 computer because you won’t be able to build one when you need it.
The end result is that the old machine is now running again. Unfortunately, this process took too many hours out of my day today to fix. It was a relatively simple problem but it just took a while to get from step to step. That was frustrating…but disaster averted so oh well. On the road again! Now, I just gotta get caught up from the time I missed today.
