Fixing PCs Again
Last year I visited friends and family interstate and fixed their computers. This year, I did the same.
Read on for a tale of woe, delivered in PowerPoint style for no readily apparent reason.
The Problem
- An ancient Celeron 1.16GHz PC
- Glaciallly slow
- Located in regional South Australia
- Hard drive LED permanently on
- The cause: 256MB of RAM
Plan A: RAM upgrade
- Putting in another 512MB an easy performance hit
- But RAM for this old SiS-chipset machine no longer available
- What to do instead?
Plan B: CPU / Mobo / RAM upgrade
- Purchased from Adelaide vendor:
- AMD Sempron 3400+
- Asus Motherboard
- Kingston RAM
- new PSU
- Also supplied, at no extra charge:
- Niggling feeling that it would all end in tears, miles from the vendor
Before upgrade: Backup
- PC owner cheerfully declares that backups have never been performed
- But is able to recite work-related story of paying $18,000 to recover a failed hard drive after backups were found to be faulty
- Two laptops identified as potential temporary backup targets
- Windows laptop
- PowerBook
- Guess which worked, and which didn’t?
- Windows Networking, an oxymoron?
Fitting the hardware
- Old motherboard, PSU and assorted cables removed easily
- New hardware installed fairly easily, except for
- Motherboard had a 24-pin power connector
- Supplied PSU only a 20-pin connector
- Quick phone call to vendor who advised just sticking it in anyway
- Which worked, much to my surprise
Booting Bluescreening Windows
- Booting existing installation of Windows:
- Spontaneous reboot soon after loading kernel
- Safe mode gave the same problem
- Booting from the original XP Home CD:
- BSOD, somewhere in the PCI driver
- What to do?
A Solution?
- After a short Google search:
- BSOD from the original CD may be due to incompatibilities with PCI-express hardware
- Fixed in SP2
- Just need to slipstream SP2 onto the XP Home CD
- Fortunately we had a second Windows machine handy with a CD burner
- The laptop mentioned earlier
Slipstreaming, Attempt 1
- Paul Thurott’s Guide looked promising
- Two problems:
- No CD burning software installed
- Freeware CDBurnerXP Pro downloaded instead
- Slow network connection
- SP2 download took about 2 hours
- No CD burning software installed
- CD burned after attempting to guess the right settings for CDBurnerXP based on Thurott’s guide for other software
- Booted the new machine
- But BSOD after loading Windows kernel
UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUMEor somesuch
Subtask: Postpone Automated Updates
- During the 2 hour SP2 download, got repeatedly nagged:
- “You need to reboot to complete the installation of these updates”
- “System will automatically reboot in 5 mins”
- Two buttons “Reboot Now”, “Reboot Later”
- Missing third button “Can’t you see I’m busy doing something?”
- Had to sit and watch the download to repeatedly press “Reboot Later” whenever it popped up
- Not sure what updates these were anyway
- Possibly related to the AV software (Symantec)
Slipstreaming, Attempt 2
- Used Tacktech guide linked from CDBurnerXP site
- Would not boot the new machine
- Got NTLDR error after the “Press any key to boot from CD” prompt
Slipstreaming, Attempt 3
- Used nLite to perform slipstreaming
- Intended to use it to generate easy-to-burn ISO
- More downloading (.NET framework)
- Pleasant surprise: nLite can burn directly to CD
- Not obvious from the website or the application itself
- Third time, success
- Booted Windows installer
- Performed Repair installation
- No data lost
- No software needing reinstallation
- Total time to produce working Windows CD: about 4 hours
Lessons Learned
- If you can’t be backwards compatible (ie boot an original XP CD), at least make it easy to upgrade
- Corollary: Slipstreaming and creating bootable CDs, should be part of the OS
- Automatic updates are annoying
- Automated reboots are unforgivable
- After a hard day with hardware, Coopers helps ease the pain
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