Erin's computer started acting up a couple of days ago. The keyboard would get into a key repeat loop, but it seemed only when she opened certain programs...EverQuest being a big one. Finally, tonight we ran to grab a new keyboard. We brought it home, shut the computer down, removed the old, added the new, and booted up... to nothing, just a black screen staring back at us. The fans on the power supply did not seem to be working, so I assumed that was it. Lucky for me, I keep a spare around just in case. I switched it out and...nothing but a black screen. Erin decided to call it a night then...I should have joined her.
For some reason I opted to let it sit there and see if it ever got past the black screen. About 20 minutes later a message finally popped up talking about how the windows\system32\config\system was either corrupt or missing. Which, of course, got me thinking about hard drive failure. I shut it down and started making room to back up her harddrive on mine. Backup made and power supply put back, I started again. About an hour or two of orthodox methods yielded no results, so I turned to a couple of unorthodox ones. While they seemed risky, I was convinced they were my last resort anyways, so who cares, right? A couple attempts and I was booting. Yay, right? No, it just kept getting worse.
Once it was booted, it had no memory of any of the drivers for the hardware that was installed or any of the Windows updates that had been applied. Another hour of playing with driver updates and all I had left was the video card not being recognized, but I got hung up there. All of the programs that required or relyed on a service of some sort would fail, installation and uninstallation of software failed, kept wanting me to install Service Pack 2 (which was already installed) but failed everytime I tried. I found a number of Microsoft utilities that claimed to fix the problem I was having, but of course would not work because they had to be installed. Normal or safe mode, same results. I finally got Service Pack 2 to download outside of Windows Update and for some reason it let me install that. Magically, everything fell into place. The two virus scanners were still borked, but everything else was fine. I knew it was clean because I had already scanned it with my machine. So, I removed Norton (subscrption as past anyways) and reinstalled AVG.
Now, after six hours, it appears that everything is happy, but I will probably wake up later and it will have exploded. I am not ruling out hard drive failure, so I am keeping my backup copy until I am sure Erin has backed everything up (ie probably forever :) ). I am hoping that it was just a fluke file corruption problem and nothing more. Still, six hours of playing really sucks.
