A narcoleptic harddisk and the BSOD
My girlfriends laptop has been through a lot and lately it has started to behave in a strange way and cause alot of problems. Ok, I must admit that the biggest problem sits between the keyboard and the chair (surprisingly that’s me) and last week I had the honor of baptising this laptop with Coca Cola. Now, that wasn’t the first time I poured edible liquid over a keyboard, but it was the first time I coudn’t detach the keyboard, disassemble it and throw the pieces into the shower. That’s a drawback with laptops.
Anyhow, after a lengthy operation using moonshine and q-tips, removing most of the sticky fluid, I turned the power back on and crossed my fingers.
It didn’t work as expected. Entering a ‘P’ and notepad responded with ‘Q\\\r’ and the spacebar had taken the resposibility of the left arrow and so on.
So, I figured the keyboard was lost, and that the only solution was to detach the whole thing and connect an external one.
I started to remove almost everything that kept the machine together and finally I sat with two motherboard connected cables in front of me. Whatever that was connected in their rear ends was unknown to me, so this was a 50-50 shot. I pulled out the one closest to me, and started to assemble the pieces back into something that looked like a laptop - and turned it on. Now, to my surprised the keyboard (which I thought was disconnected) worked like a charm. The mouse-pad didn’t! That I can live with.
But I got another problem that is really bugging me. It is a blue screen of death that is starting to take over. It started a month back, before the Coca Cola insident. At first it was just normal BSOD. But after rebooting the machine it came back. So I figured it was time for a ‘Windows repair’. It didn’t help. So I started to remove alot of crappy software that I’d blindly downloaded and installed . No difference - the BSOD resurrected. So, without a clue, I started listening to my (or my girlfrieds) computer. The normal response would ofcourse be to slap it around, but this time I actually sat there listening to the computer. After just a couple of seconds there was a ‘click’. It came from the hard disk. It was a ‘click’ and then I could hear that the disk was slowly loosing speed until it completely stopped. At that time I knew something was not right. Running Window XP on 768MB of RAM should require something like a 1.8GB pagefile, so, to my knowledge the disk should be knee deep in work and spinning all the time. Anyway, after it stopped there was about 10 seconds of utter silence, and then the dreaded BSOD.
I rebooted the machine and experienced the phenomenon three or four times before I lost my patience. It raised the piece of crap over my head and shaked it around. You know what? The disk actually started to spin again. Faster and faster, and no silence - and no blue screen.
So I sat there shaking it every other minute or so and decided that I had to backup my most valuable work. 400megs ended up here on this web server. That was easy. But the rest of the data had to go to some writeable CDs. That wasn’t easy. I had to finetune my shaking - the harddisk want more and more, while the CD drive didn’t like it at all. Well, but in the end figured out a fine ballance between the BSOD and a failed burning session.
To wrap it up, does anyone know a good, non violent cure to wake up a narcoleptic harddisk?
