Posted on 02/28/2003 11:38:50 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
NOW I know how a doctor feels when he loses a patient whose problems have cascaded from minor to fatal -- and it's partly the physician's fault.
In my case, the death in the family is my own PC. I tried treating it for the digital equivalent of a hangnail, and in the end wound up killing the poor guy. Normally, I wouldn't go into the painful details of my troubleshooting failures, but this one is so spectacular and so full of lessons to be learned that I simply must share it.
The victim is the computer that I built myself and wrote about late last year (see www.chron.com/homegrown) -- a 2.26-gigahertz Pentium 4-based system running Windows XP Professional. It's been an excellent machine, and I was just telling a friend a week or two ago how reliable and stable it's been.
Shoulda kept my mouth shut.
My problems began when I installed some new software that I plan to review -- Easy CD & DVD Creator 6, the latest version of Roxio's best-selling program for burning CDs and now DVDs. It's possible that my woes actually were percolating before this and I didn't know it, but the chain of events that turned my PC into a paperweight began with this installation.
After installing the program, I noticed that some of the icons for background programs that normally show up in the system tray were no longer there. The Task Manager showed the programs themselves were running, but I couldn't get to them via the customary icons.
It was time to launch into troubleshooting mode, a state of being I know all too well. Fire off an e-mail to Roxio tech support. Do a search on Roxio's support forums, on the Web and in Usenet news groups to see if anyone else has this problem. Scan the included help files and README.TXT documents.
I came up empty.
Next, I reinstalled a couple of the smaller programs whose icons had vanished. That worked, and they reappeared. With those minor successes under my belt, I decided to reinstall a larger program that had been affected -- Norton Antivirus 2003.
That didn't work. In fact, a major part of Norton Antivirus had quit working -- the Auto-Protect feature that scans for viruses automatically. It seemed to be permanently disabled in the program's control panel.
More troubleshooting. Back to the Web, search Symantec's knowledge base documents. Bingo! An article there indicated this problem could be caused by the Klez or Elkern viruses, by a corrupt program installation or because certain components of the program were kept from launching at startup.
I scanned the PC for viruses -- it was clean. I made sure every part of the program started as it is supposed to. The problem seemed to be a corrupt installation, so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it.
That didn't work. I did it again, with a slightly different approach. No joy. I found a knowledge base article that had detailed instructions on manually removing it, then reinstalled. Nope.
In all, I probably uninstalled and reinstalled Norton Antivirus six or seven times, using a different strategy each time. It would just not work.
Well, maybe Roxio's product was the cause. I uninstalled it, then went through the uninstall / reinstall dance again with Norton. Big fat nada.
At this point, most of my PC was still functioning. I had Internet access and I could get to all my drives. I just felt naked without antivirus protection. And that's when I made my biggest mistake, the one that sent my PC into intensive care.
Windows XP has a nifty feature called System Restore. It can roll back the settings and even restore some files from a previous point in time. Just the other day, my brother-in-law nearly wept with joy after I walked him through it to fix a serious problem. System Restore saved his butt, but in this case, it kicked mine.
My boneheaded move was to have System Restore pull up settings and files from a point too far back in time, before I had made major substantive changes to my PC's setup. For example, in order to make sure Easy CD & DVD Creator worked properly, I uninstalled a competing product I'd been trying, Nero Burning ROM 5.5. I made the mistake of telling System Restore to go back to when Nero was still present on my system. When Windows came up, its registry settings expected to find Nero -- only it was no longer there.
Suddenly, I no longer had access to my CD drives. I couldn't get Windows to reinstall the drivers for them. And, for some reason, I no longer had access to my home network, nor to the Internet.
No drives. No Internet access. No network. No antivirus protection.
No brains!
Not only that, but System Restore wouldn't launch now to possibly allow me to undo my mistake. In fact, nothing related to the Windows Help system, of which System Restore is a part, would launch.
At this point, desperation overwhelmed me. I knew I could boot the PC from the CD-ROM, so I dug out my Windows XP disk and jumped at what I hoped would be the final solution.
I could boot from the CD because newer computers can access those kinds of drives early in the bootup process, before the operating system grabs control. I would reinstall Windows by booting from the CD. But upon the first reboot in the Windows XP setup, I got a blue screen of death.
I was later able to coax the setup routine back into action, but now that Windows was partially installed, my CD drives were no longer recognized. The computer once again couldn't see the CD drives to access the Windows XP disk.
And that, for now, is where I've left it. There are other things I can do, but I have a feeling I know what I'm going to end up doing -- formatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows and all my applications. My weekend is now spoken for.
Where did I go wrong? I'd love to hear from you if you are aware of something I could have done differently along this treacherous path. If you'd been in my situation, how would you have handled it?
And please, no "you should have been using a Mac" e-mails. Consider that a given.
Send e-mail to dwight.silverman@chron.com. His Web site is www.dwightsilverman.com.
I never did like it.
Dumping Nero for Roxio is like ditching Linda Vester for Madonna.
Some things just shouldn't be done.. and, as such deserve reprisal!
First test is to disconnect the IDE or SCSI connector and then the power and any other connectors to the CD device.
Then try to start the PC.
IF it works, get a new Yamaha mechanism or some other which is likely to provide the kind of service which can keep up with the CD burning software.
Recovery console will also let you delete or rename files. Here again, you may have been able to rename or delete Roxio's drivers assuming you knew what their name was.
Of course hindsight is always easier than foresight.
Good luck on your reload!
I also burn a copy just before doing an installation of anything hairy, like a new video or sound driver. If the new one hoses things up, I don't even uninstall it; I write over the whole partition with the disk copy. That way I'm sure it's gone, and I'm sure that everything else is back the way it was.
It's too late now to say "you should have been using a Mac". It would have avoided the miserable experience he described, but that's water under the bridge now.
But if he wants to avoid those problems in the future, he should throw his low quality crap computer in the dumpster - and get a Mac.
My dislike for Norton goes back to Win 3.1, it's always caused more trouble than it ever fixes. (Any software that wants to be "king of the computer" clashes with me tho, cause that's my job.;-))
I've yet to see Roxio install and work without trashing things up. The best uninstall is not to install it in the first place.
That's 3 strikes right there, and I can tell he's a virus paranoid too.
Oh yeah.. Nero recognizes my drive's buffer under-run hardware. Haven't burned a bad disk yet.
Roxio and (to my surprise) Hotburn (By IOMega) were just wasteful in that regard. Just awful.
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