It collapsed in some style, as well, in a proper smoking ruin.
For the last couple of days, the PC's been playing up on startup - not getting even as far as the boot diagnostics sometimes, and occasionally booting straight to the BIOS setting for CPU speed. Still, a quick reset, or a "exit and don't save" worked, and Windows came back. Now, though... I went away for the weekend, came back and on startup it got to the Windows XP loading screen, then straight to the BSOD which, far as I can tell, XP only features while it's trying to start.
In any case, it did the usual, "a problem has been detected and windows has shut down to prevent serious harm to your PC", or whatever, and gave the reason as "Unmountable Boot Device" or some such. Now even to my untrained eyes, it seemed fairly clear that the system drive had catastrophically fallen over, and so I stuck in the XP CD and, on establishing there was nothing on the C: drive at all, attempted a (admittedly hopeful) recovery with FIXMBR and FIXBOOT C: ... both of which reported a nonstandard boot sector, and both of which claimed to fix it.
On reset, though, no change. Unmountable Boot Device. So, I formatted C: (happily, I've learned to keep important stuff on D: and E
, reinstalled XP and here I am again. But what would cause this kind of thing? Is my PC fundamentally b0rked and this is just waiting to happen again..?
All I've changed is:
(1) taken out a CD writer that didn't work, and its IDE cable (it was the only thing on secondary IDE)
(2) taken out a soundcard
(3) switched on the onboard sound
Any ideas? Should I be keeping a very close eye on my HDD? Or could it possibly have been a one-off catastrophic failure?
For the last couple of days, the PC's been playing up on startup - not getting even as far as the boot diagnostics sometimes, and occasionally booting straight to the BIOS setting for CPU speed. Still, a quick reset, or a "exit and don't save" worked, and Windows came back. Now, though... I went away for the weekend, came back and on startup it got to the Windows XP loading screen, then straight to the BSOD which, far as I can tell, XP only features while it's trying to start.
In any case, it did the usual, "a problem has been detected and windows has shut down to prevent serious harm to your PC", or whatever, and gave the reason as "Unmountable Boot Device" or some such. Now even to my untrained eyes, it seemed fairly clear that the system drive had catastrophically fallen over, and so I stuck in the XP CD and, on establishing there was nothing on the C: drive at all, attempted a (admittedly hopeful) recovery with FIXMBR and FIXBOOT C: ... both of which reported a nonstandard boot sector, and both of which claimed to fix it.
On reset, though, no change. Unmountable Boot Device. So, I formatted C: (happily, I've learned to keep important stuff on D: and E
, reinstalled XP and here I am again. But what would cause this kind of thing? Is my PC fundamentally b0rked and this is just waiting to happen again..?All I've changed is:
(1) taken out a CD writer that didn't work, and its IDE cable (it was the only thing on secondary IDE)
(2) taken out a soundcard
(3) switched on the onboard sound
Any ideas? Should I be keeping a very close eye on my HDD? Or could it possibly have been a one-off catastrophic failure?
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