*Mutters darkly*

Sigh.
I just spent the last 4 hours of my life wrestling with the PC.
It just woke up today and decided that booting was a generally bad idea, and thought that it might be nice to take a short vacation. So it happily changed (unbeknowns to me) a random registry setting and stopped booting.

The symptom: It would show the processor screen, and then verify that all the hard-drives were working, but then at the boot screen, it hung on the message: "Verifying DMS pool data...............update complete."
And it then decided to just sit there. There is no mouse imput at that screen, but keyboard input is accepted.

Early attempts at fixing this problem failed. The first thing I tried to do is restart the PC, attempting to open the boot-menu, allowing me to load the last configuration settings that worked. That was a failure. After that, I tried to turn off the PC at the wall and wait for a while, in hopes that some of the hardware would reset. (This works sometimes)

Failure. I then decided to take out the notebook and do some research. (Note that by this time I had called dad - an ex-pc engineer, but he was as stumped as I was.)
Of course, my sister had taken the laptop out of the house so she had something to do while mum was working at the pool.

It then occurred to me that we had another laptop...
Granted, the CD drive no longer opened and it was more than 10 years old, there was a chance that if I could get the internet working, I could do the necessary research and hopefully get the PC back.

I took it out of the bag. The network card was lying next to it, but I decided to use the USB one that is currently in the main PC, since it is faster.
The configuration tool for this USB network-card is, of course, on a CD, which I could not put into the laptop, on account of it being dropped some time ago.

Shuddering to myself, I placed the old network-card into the laptop. The lights started happily blinking, and then Windows played the "Hardware failed to disconnect" sound, and rejected the network card.

After letting out a world-weary sigh, I opened up the device manager for the notebook and noticed that that particular card had been disabled.
After enabling it, the lights started blinking merrily again, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself.

Hopping on the internet (with fluctuating signal strength, sometimes disconnecting for a second), I began my search for some answers. It seems that this is not a unique problem.
I looked in horror as it said that the problem can be caused by corrupt hard-drives, and that buying new ones could solve the problem.
That, by the way, is not cool, as it involves me losing EVERYTHING. Not an idea I was too keen on. I read on...

Apparently, this problem can also be generated by the PC attempting to boot from a floppy-disk or a CD/ROM.
"That must be the answer!" I thought triumphantly.

Parading into the DOS screen, (Which I, thankfully, could access), I looked up the setting which decides where Windows boots from. Sure enough, it had been, fruitlessly, attempting to boot from a CD. Now, last time I checked, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion does NOT come with the partition to boot Windows XP Professional Edition, so that would explain why the PC was not booting.

I changed this setting, saved and exited the registry, and re-booted the PC.
Voila, it worked!


So here I am, feeling a lovely warm-fuzzy glow knowing that I fixed this problem, and also feeling quite dark that it wasted so much of my time.


At least it was something to blog about...


*Looking back, this is quite a lot of text. I know I wouldn't read it, were I reading someone else's blog...save for maybe Alden's...since that is usually interesting. Or Yang's. Unless he posted one of those humungo philosophy things....so damn long...*