Hi all,

OK, this take a bit to set up, but here it goes.

Yesterday I was trying to fire up Mercs, only to discover that the CDROM drive wasn't mounted during boot. Not a huge issue--this CDROM has never played well with XP (as anybody who was dropped with me can attest--it always takes about 5 minutes to run though the CD check) and usually the problem resolves with a reboot. But yesterday I was impaitent, so I put into my 4x 4x 16x ancient burner. OK, so Mercs fires up, the CD check begins...and nothing. The computer freezes up. Well, that is not entirely true, the unmounted CD drive began randomly opening and closing its drawer! My computer was possessed. I allowed this to continue for about 10 minutes, then I did a hard shut down (because closing the Mercs process had no effect).

Well, that did something to my system it seems. Upon reboot it performed a checkdisk (no surprises, except I had 60K in bad sectors), my ICQ was hosed, and surfing became annoying--page errors or refusals to load, at least in Firefox. I got ICQ working, and then ran a Trend housecall virus scan on my system. Results were negative. But, the system becan working fine from that point, and I continued with my evening, shutting down at night.

This morning it got worse. Login again took me to checkdisk (shutdown went fine last night), but the login to the default profile is never completed. This means I cannot access my working profile. This happened once before, when my cable modem was on the decline, but a call to Charter has ruled out connectivity issues. Nothing I have done has allowed me to gain access to that profile: removing the password on that account, rolling back to a system restore point, disconnecting the wonky CDROM drive (suggested to be a potential problem by a friend).

So, am I facing a reformat of the system partition? Is my hard drive starting to die (its a Hitachi DeskStar, which a friend has called "DeathStar")? I went out and got a new Seagate HD, but do I really need it? I also got a new burner, and am about to install it.

Suggestions?

Update: after trying and trying to log into my side, I logged of my wife's profile, thinking I would have to reboot. HOWEVER, it has now let me onto my profile.

Something screwy is going on...

Coming up with bad sectors is a bad thing. The drive could be going out, or the data cable could be loose/damaged, which might explain the wonky cdrom behavior. Another thing, is your computer overclocked? If so, do you have the agp/pci bus locked? IIRC, if the pci bus is ~38mhz or higher (33mhz for stock) we run the risk of corrupting HD data.

I was considering getting a Hitachi DeskStar when I built my Xeon, but I read more bad things about the drive than good, so I passed on it and went with a Western Digital SE. Mostly because it's usually a bad sign if a piece of hardware has a derogatory nick name (this case being the "DeathStar"). Anyway, use a new data cable when you install your cdrom, that is, if you have one available.

Good Luck, and let us know how it turns out.


*edit* Bili types faster than I do! *eoe*

I think your profile is hosed.

Only as a short-term patch: have you tried to login as Administrator? If you can, do so, then create another profile for yourself and backup your files from your old profile. Also, start backing up the important files to DVD or CD, because the moment your hard drive records bad sectors you should consider it untrustworthy.

To login as administrator

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/admins.htm.

And yes, you need the other hard drive.

Hi all,

I'm on in my profile right now--it and the other are other admin level. I have already backed up the profile (but elsewhere on the same HD lol!), and am preparing to fight with the new HD. Once I get it up and running, I will copy all files to the new one, and use the old one until it dies. Still, I'm not happy about having to find and install all that Mercs stuff all over again

[Edit: nothing overclocked no]

OK, we seem to be zeroing in on something. Fast User Switching is hosed. What services might be corrupted?

From a knock-off of BlackViper's website:

#

Fast User Switching Compatibility ~ Unless you have many users on a system, you probably do not even need this service to be running. You could, however, benefit greatly if you use this service in conjunction with Remote Desktop.

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Dependencies:
o

Terminal Services

Terminal Services isn't terribly important (I think), mainly Remote Desktop and that kind of stuff.