Ahhh - PC just died on me - smiley faced charactor!

Hawk Tuah

Hawk Tuah

Hawk Tuah

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
14,280
Location
Sandwich, Kent
I uninstalled the K-Lite codec pack (was going to instal a newer version).

I was about to reset when I got a message bubble saying 'unable to write to L: some data may have been lost. I thought nothing of it and carried on rebooting.

However on reboot, as soon as it gets to read the disk I get a series of underscores flash across the screen, then it halts with a smiley face down the bottom left of the black screen and thats it! It happens before I get anywhere near windows, so no safe mode available.

I'm wondering whether its somehow corrupted my MBR? What do you think?

I'm thinking of using the XP disk to repair windows (cant be doing with a full reinstall at the moment. Any more simple ways of repairing it?
 
lowrider007 said:
this *may* work,

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/483/xp_repair_fix_master_boot_record_recovery_console

I can't think of anythink else atm.
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Thanks mate. To fix the mbr, type fixmbr. Really does what is says on the tin. :p

Hopefuly that'll sove it. I'm kind of thinking it might be a bit of malicious code. Seems such an odd thing to suddenly happen, and that smiley face it just too suspicious.

If it doesn't all work I may just reinstall. I have a 200gig and a 300gig HD. My main files are on the 300 gig D drive. All I would loose is my Oblivion save game (or is that stored in My Documents?) and a few naughty videos
paranoid.gif


To be honest, I could do with partitioning the 200 gig drive. Make it a 40 gig for windows (easy to format and reinstall) then the rest for storage.
 
I'd worry about why u got a dodgy screen with a smiley, seems suspect to me.

Anywho Oblivion saves are in ' My Docs > My Games > Oblivion '..... ;)
 
Is the smiley face just the ASCII character or is it actually a bitmap graphic? If the latter then you've been hacked/trojan'd by some sort of sadistic 1980's hacker. If the former then some program/device driver decided to output a load of gibberish to the screen and that's possibly recoverable...
 
NathanE said:
Is the smiley face just the ASCII character or is it actually a bitmap graphic? If the latter then you've been hacked/trojan'd by some sort of sadistic 1980's hacker. If the former then some program/device driver decided to output a load of gibberish to the screen and that's possibly recoverable...
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Its an ASCII character. The thing is, a virus which kills your computer is bound to failure, as it then can't propegate. I'm thinking something went wrong with the uninstall of the codec pack. I also removed a portable hard drive without using 'remove device'. Perhaps that had some play in it.

ViRuS2k said:
a 200gig format would take seconds if you just did a fast wipe lol

format c: /q

q = quick lol
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There's a bit more to fixing my system drive than just quick formatting it. Install windows, and all my software, plus loosing all the files that are on there. Takes longer than a few seconds. Plus the fact I'd have to wip the disk out to try and recover the files.

Will try recovery consoles fixmbr when I get home from work. If that doesnt work I'll take the drive out, put it in another machine and copy the files off. Then repartition it and do a fresh reinstall. Fortunately I have an IDE to SATA converter handy, so I can put the disk straight into my server.
 
I'd whip the drive out and get your data off it before trying any hero stuff :)

It's sounds pretty terminal though :( I take it you've tried the common guff like Safe Mode etc?
 
NathanE said:
I'd whip the drive out and get your data off it before trying any hero stuff :)

It's sounds pretty terminal though :( I take it you've tried the common guff like Safe Mode etc?
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Tried but can't. Doesn't get that far. Thats what made me think it was the MBR.
 
How odd. Put the XP disk in, system went to the 'press any key to boot'. Realise I still had my USB keyboard in, and for some reason AsRock decided to make USB legacy support NOT the default option in the BIOS, so it ignored my frantic button pushing.

I was about to press reset, when low and behold, I see the windows loading page. :confused:

I was playing Oblivion for about 6 hours. Perhaps the drives, or something got a bit hot. Strange. I was trying to about half and hour to get the blooming thing to boot last night.

I did have the heating up quite high. But still, this rig has 3 120mm case fans, running stock speeds with the retail cooler. I also have a seperate temperature monitoring unit on it (monitoring CPU, Graphics and North bridge) Everything seemed fine.

Perhaps some Ram sinks, and a Zalman might help. :confused:
 
Make yourself a BARTpe install cd. That way you can access any ntfs formated drive and copy whats needed for recovery
 
NathanE said:
3x 130mm case fans is great... but if its a P4 Smithfield you'll need to triple them :p
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Nope. Its ...

Core2Duo e6400
Radeon X1900 GT
2gb PC5300 Ram
AsRock 945i Conroe
200gb WD
300gb Maxtor
Pioneer DVDR
550watt PSU
USB Card
PCMCIA Card

Dell WFP2407

Logitech S510 Keyboard
Logitech MX1000 mouse

Freecom 80gb External 3.5in drive
Generic 60gb external 2.5in drive.

Can't wait to get my new camera for Xmas and I can post a pic of it. Its a fantastic looking rig in a black SilverStone 805 aluminium case.
 
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