Wherein TA is screwed either way...

[dalesys]

Every time I read this thread's title I get a mental image involving T.A & a barrel...

[technical.angel]

Update the Nth.

So, yesterday, I walked into my office and found the externals on my back desk, and the LoDD on my chair.

Sigh.

I set it aside, and work on the runner up to the title of LoDD. During it, I started copying files from the externals to my hard drive.

I finally finish it, and have no excuse but to move to the LoDD.

So, I turn it on and turn back around to CS chat while it boots. As expected, I got a little distracted. Big Boss comes in for the day, and sticks his head in my office, and gets this panicked look on his face. I turn around, and the LoDD is doing a disk check. I told him that, and he calmed down. So, he went upstairs and I waited for the disk check to finish.

I turn it on, and it goes back to installing HP software. I , it fails... AGAIN. When it reboots, I go into safe mode and turn off the two startup services we turned off before. Reboot, and (angelic choir) ahhhhaaa!!! (/angelic choir) desktop.

I notice the pop up from Windows Security saying there was no AV installed, which was odd, because Big Boss said he installed AVG. (Which, I did grimace when he told me that he told me). So, I start over to check My Documents to see if the files he spent several hours transferring were there. And... BAM! Reboot. I sigh, and wait. Then I'm presented with a request to please wait while Windows starts. I wait, and wait, and wait. Finally I'm presented with.... Windows Setup screen????

What the heck, so I went through Windows setup. It finished, popped up a message asking me if the computer could access Windows Updates for drivers.. which I said, sure, why not? It briefly popped up a message about the CD drive drivers.... AND....................... BAM. Shutdown.

At that point, I gave up, since I was planning on heading home early, sent out an email to Big boss and manager, put the LoDD in Manager's office, was about to head out, when I realized Manager was missing, and AAFH had just gone to lunch.

So, I was stuck there for another hour. :: pouts ::

Manager and AAFH walked back in together. I talked to Manager, who said that she was just going to hand it back to Big Boss.

I took today off. YAY!

Just a minute ago, I got an email from Manager to me and Big Boss. "I gave her the working laptop and she was thrilled it worked so well. Apparently the laptop was used in Iraq by her brother so it has had quite a life. It's offically out of our hands, and she sends her much appreciated thanks to you both."

AND... DONE!

[technical.angel]

I still have to ask Big Boss what to do about the backups. Either way, I think I'll probably copy them over to my PC, just in case.

[Fire_on_High]

Hold onto the backups or this kid's gonna lose her shirt in very short order...

[technical.angel]

Well, if I did the math right, the college has wasted at least $414 of MY time on it. I don't know how much Big Boss makes, or how to transfer that into an hourly wage, so I'm not counting his time. (Yes, start making fun of my hourly wage.. you have the right.)

As a small update on the status of the LoDD, Big Boss said he found some files on the hard drive that were for Win 2x server. We figure that happened with the updates.

So, he's reformatting... AGAIN, and I've been instructed to only uninstall the pre-installed AV, install our corporate AV, and put her files back on.... oh, and keep everything thing that can cross crossed.

More when I get the LoDD back.

[TheSHAD0W]

A fair-sized 2.5" hard drive can be had for under $50. It can be installed inside of an hour, if you have the right tools. Then add the time for reinstalling the OS. How many hours did you waste trying to get that POS up? At your salary, how much did that add up to?

[technical.angel]

I'm BAAAAAACK!

Well, I didn't follow RD's advice fast enough.

Right now the LoDD is in time out. No power, no USB, no nothing. Not until it learns it's lesson. Harumph.

Remove trial of Norton - Pass
Install Uni's corporate AV - Pass
Install Windows Update - FAIL!!

So, after the AV installed, I opened up IE and started navigating through Win Updates. I had just gotten to the screen before the available updates when the auto updater popped up and asked me to restart. Surrrrre.

So I did.

And then went to lunch.

I came back and opened IE to do more updates....... and it crashed. Grr. Tried again, and the start menu froze. Tried to bring up task manger... failed. Restarted. Frozen start menu, no task manager. Restarted. LoDD decides that explorer.exe is an optional service. Won't run it, won't give me task manager. Restarted.. Windows splash screen.

Turned it off, unplugged the power and let it sit for a few minutes. Used Last Known Good Config, and after taking it's precious time, it got to the desktop, minus explorer.exe.

I'm about ready to kill at this point.

I boot into safe mode. It gets to Preparing user's desktop or profile, or something like that, and thinks and thinks, and then loops back to the login screen for a second, and then back to preparing somethingortheother. I let it sit for a good 5 minutes. No change.

So, that's when it got put into time out.

Before I could finish this post, Big Boss came back from lunch. I caught him at the top of the stairs.

"<Big Boss>, I wouldn't go too far!!"
"Again?? You broke it again!??!"
Then the DBA piped in, "You broke the latop again? Why?"
"Um... because.... it insulted me!"

So, Big Boss grabs it, and takes it out to the couch. I tell him everything that I did, and everything the laptop failed to do.

He was the one that noticed when it looped, it was actually BSODing. It go from preparing system security (I was close...), to BSOD, to login screen to preparing system security. Over and over and over and over...

Big Boss doesn't want to believe it's hardware related. He's leaning toward drivers. So his plan of attack is reloading NTLoader. Then trying to figure out how to run a repair, since the recovery CDs don't have the recovery console on them, then reformatting it again, if necessary. That's not preferable, as it took all day to reformat it the first time.

One good piece of news. He said that after wiping and formatting the HD, his diag tool did not find any bad sectors.

But, once again, it's out of my hands, and I don't have to worry about it.

[technical.angel]

That's the plan!

[RestaurantDude]

Get it working, then get rid of it before it sh*ts itself again!

[technical.angel]

Okay, so that WASN'T the end of it.

Big boss had it working JUST fine in his office, so he brought it down to me to put her files back on.

I carefully plug in the power. I gingerly open the lid. I close my eyes, and I hit the power button. It was rather anti-climatic when it actually made it to the Windows boot screen, and started loading the profile.

But, wait, if that was the case, why would I be back here????

I turn around (my work bench is located behind my main computer desk) to tell RestaurantDude of my victory. I turned back around... and bam. HP is telling me there was an unrecoverable error while installing software. No, I did NOT cry. (I was close, but still.)

I called up big boss to tell him that the computer just does NOT like me and get a "WHAT DID YOU DO?????"

So, after awhile, he came back down. When HE restarted it, it would actually "install" the software. IE, not pop up the error message it gave me. Then it would restart. And then try to install software... and restart. Rinse and repeat.

I'm nearly when he gets the awesome idea to boot into safe mode and check the startup.

So, we removed two offending entries in startup, and it booted TO THE DESKTOP!

There was much rejoicing.

So, now, AV install is almost done, Windows updates are next. Get the files tossed on there, and it's OUTTA HERE!

[technical.angel]

Actually... lol.

Big Boss just approved the purchase of about 10-15 new arrays. :: is proud she remembered the terminology ::

Network admin came back from paternity leave yesterday, just in time to call time of death of the WAPs in one of the buildings. We have 2 or 3 more buildings with the same model of access points that are doing the same thing the other two were doing before they died. So, he doesn't expect them to last long.

Since one of those buildings is the IT building, I hope those arrays come in soon. Maybe I'll finally have consistent wireless in my office. (AP is in the middle of the building on the second floor, I'm on the end of the building on the first floor).

[Geek King]

He decides that, since the trouble we're having with the students already (a little thing about wireless and two of our buildings...),

So, my idea of just planting a cell tower in the center of the campus and just running the network through that is looking better?

[Andara Bledin]

If you have a failing HDD the first order of business is to get a new drive, then try to copy over the data as quickly as possible to the new drive before the old one kicks the bucket.

Trying to reinstall onto a machine that is already having severe hardware faults (sounds like a bad mobo or corrupt BIOS) is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Its going down anyways no matter what you do.

Well, see, that all depends on what's up with the drive.

I had a drive that had bad sectors that would intermittently lose data. It was still there, and you could find it in a search, but it couldn't otherwise find it. But I had partitioned the drive, so it ended up with the first partition being completely unstable and unusable, but the rest of the drive (which was the lion's share) was perfectly fine for years.

^-.-^

[technical.angel]

I still have all her information backed up. I'll talk to big boss tomorrow about how long we'll hold onto it.

I'm putting this all into manager and big boss's hands. I really can't take any more of it.

[Hyndis]

If the HDD is failing then all this is just wasting time. The HDD will soon be completely dead.

If you have a failing HDD the first order of business is to get a new drive, then try to copy over the data as quickly as possible to the new drive before the old one kicks the bucket.

Trying to reinstall onto a machine that is already having severe hardware faults (sounds like a bad mobo or corrupt BIOS) is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Its going down anyways no matter what you do.

At some point you need to refuse to fix this mess. The machine they gave to you was already on its last legs. The OS would have been hosed soon anyways from the HDD faults.




(Note: Bad sectors only means you have a bad drive if you have an HDD. If you have an SSD it is quite normal to have bad sectors and this does not mean that the drive is failing. They just work differently.)