Computer Issues

[24601]

Alright, so... this morning I was changing/deleting the partitions of my hard drive - everything worked as planned. I stayed on the computer for a while after that, played a game for a few hours. Then, this evening, my mom plugged her hair dryer in and blew a fuse (since the one circuit has my whole room and the Christmas lights on it, and is relatively weak at that... I'm not sure why). After that, when the computer restarted, it got past all the boot screens and the windows loading screen, and then... nothing. Just a black screen. I know this only happened after the fuse blew because I had restarted the computer a few times before that and everything worked fine.

So, I tried to boot in safe mode. It said all the text with all the loaded files and then... nothing. I tried to boot in all the different safe modes (I knew it wouldn't do anything but...) and again, text then nothing. So I figured something needed repairing, got out my trusty WinXP boot disk/repair console and fired it up. It loaded all the files, got to the part where it said Windows is loading... or whatever it says, the last little thing on the bottom before you get to the menu, and then again, nothing.

When I say nothing, I mean I waited there for 10-20 minutes and it was either a black screen or in the case of the boot disk, the blue setup screen with the Windows is loading message on the bottom. Normally it goes into this black screen for a second or two every time after the windows loading screen goes away, then my blue Windows XP login screen comes up. This time, though, it never left the black screen.

Now, I'm not bad with computers. I'm not like... great, like some of you guys are, but I'm not stupid about them. I can generally figure out what's going on and generally have some idea how to fix things. If I don't, google usually does. I tried googling and came up with nothing on my first round. Then I went out to dinner. I figured maybe if I let it sit for a while, it would turn on when I got home. Kind of stupid, but it HAS happened before... kind of scary, too. Anyway...

I got home, booted it up, it got to the black screen and waited. So I went downstairs, got on my sister's laptop, and started googling again. I was down there for around 30-45 minutes, and found a few promising sites. While I was googling, I periodically went upstairs to see if anything had happened - nothing ever did. When I went upstairs with the laptop in hand with the promising sites open in firefox tabs, though... it had loaded. It took 30-45 minutes (I don't really remember when exactly I started), but it finally loaded. Now I'm scared to turn it off to see if it takes that long again.

So, my question is, what is going on? Does anyone have any idea of what might have happened? I assume now that had I waited this long with any of the other things, safe mode, boot disk, etc. they also would have worked... eventually. It's not right that it should take 45 minutes to boot up, though, when before the fuse blew it was taking no more than 2 minutes...

As for computer specs, should they be relevant...
I'm running Windows XP on a 145GB partition with a total like 245GB hard drive (only a year old), the rest of it temporarily empty (I was gonna fool around with it some more but got distracted). This has been set up like this for a while, except before this morning there was an older Kubuntu distribution on the other occupied space (which I deleted this morning).

I have 1.25GB RAM, an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ 2.01 GHz processor from the stone age that burns like it just came out of orbit and is one of 3 parts of my computer left from when I bought it way back when, an NVIDIA GeForce 6600 graphics card, a crappy motherboard that I forget the name of (another one of the 3), a lovely network card that I'm sure is not part of the problem, and a lot of particles of dust.

I'm not sure if any of that will be relevant, but... there it is, if you need something else to help me, I can provide it.

Any ideas?

[Urman]

Sounds like you might need to reinstall windows if it boots up then u most likey didnt blow anything but there is still a chance

[Paul_UK]

It is possible that there is a hardware problem with the PC, but I think that is unlikely. Try leaving it off for an hour or two to cool down though, then see if it works. I doubt it will, but it's worth trying.

Before you do anything to try to fix it, whether reinstalling Windows or whatever, do you have a current backup of everything important (work, photos, music, emails etc)? If not you need to connect the hard disk to another PC (maybe a friend's PC) as the secondary drive and backup everything. Copy it to the hard disk in that PC then burn it to DVDs or copy again to a USB drive. So you have two copies, one on the other PC and one on something portable which you can use later to get it back onto your PC if necessary.

That stage is VITAL and any repair attempt could easily result in the loss of all your data.

Once that is done then there are a few options.

Personally I take the approach that you can end up spending more time trying to sort something like this out that it would take to just wipe the partition and reinstall everything. So if it was mine and I knew I had a good backup I would load the Windows CD, go for a fresh install and format the drive.

If the backing up was a problem or there is simply far too much stuff to back up, and it is a desktop PC, then get another hard disk and connect it in place of yours. Install Windows on that and get the drivers etc sorted out. Then connect your old drive as the secondary one. Windows and the programs will then be on C:, the CD/DVD drive will be D: and your old drive will be E:. If all your stuff is accessible on E: then that is probably fine. You can delete the Windows and Program Files folders from E: and use that to store your work, while keeping Windows etc on C:. If you are doing this the new drive for C: doesn't need to be that big - 40GB would do - so it could be a second hand one.

If you don't want to do that then a repair reinstall of Windows will probably sort it. Don't do that without a good backup though - one wrong choice or a power outage part way through could wipe the drive or leave it unreadable.

[24601]

Well, as an update...

Everything was slow again yesterday, but I went into the system configuration utility and disabled a few things from starting as well as a few other settings (I can't remember what I changed exactly - seemed like good ideas at the time) and today everything booted as normal. I don't know if it was because of that or not. I also still don't understand why everything was fine BEFORE the power outage but slow after... but if it keeps going at a normal pace I won't worry about it too much, I guess.

[Paul_UK]

If I was you I would make sure you have a good backup while it's running OK, and also do a full scan for viruses and other malware.