OK, here are the specs of the dear old machine:
It's a computer I assembled for a married couple (who are pals o mine)
(4-5?) years ago. In all that time the only thing that went wrong before
now is it needed its original power supply replaced. Other than that it
has been very reliable.
EPOX EP-8RGM31 (socket A) all in one mainboard. Not sure about the CPU
probably a T-bird 1700 or thereabouts. It's an N-force 2 I think. There
is 512 MB of Rosewill PC 3200 RAM in it. A generic FDD, a generic DVD
drive, and a Seagate 75 G. IDE drive - that they never used more than 15
G. of.
Overall sounds like it should be rock solid. Other than the rosewill RAM.
(What were you thinking???) Ha Ha Seriously, I used to love Epox, one of
my favorite brands of mainboard. Good stuff.
I tried downloading the manual in PDF format from the EPOX web site,
several times, but the connection keeps getting reset.
I don't think the manual for the motherboard is going to help you in this
situation, after I read what else you had to write.
I took the hard drive out and put it in an external IDE enclosure I had
knocking around, and used my own Windows PC to look at what is visible on
the drive.
Nothing wrong with that.
I found nothing hidden anywhere. It looks for all the world like a drive
that just had the OS newly installed - nothing but the generic sample
sounds in the music folder, for example.
How's the saying go? If it walks like a duck...
But there are traces of the disaster - a couple of user-created folders
exist, but they are empty of contents.
How do you figure that's traces of a disaster? Do you see a date on the
folders? When were they created?
Mechanically there seems to be nothing wrong with the computer.
I'd almost be willing to bet my next paycheck that the hardware is OK.
It's
just old and not very sexy. But something did go seriously wrong during
that update.
Not during the update.
I get the feeling there is more to their story than I was told.
Yeah, it's likely the update caused the system to be unbootable, so someone
(possibly thinking they were being helpful!) tried to install Windows by
formatting Drive C:
That's my best guess anyway.
But since they are not one bit tech-savvy, they don't know how to tell me
what they did during the update procedure that botched things so badly.
Serious question...can you CONFIRM that SP3 is installed? I'm betting if
you check, you will find that -Windows- was recently installed. Heck, it
might not even have SP1 on that hard drive.
To me, this sounds like a clear-cut case of Operator Headspace. Not on your
part. On the usual users of the system. Think about this a second...what
are the odds that a service pack install would update OS files and at the
same time delete almost every other file on the hard drive? I like to
insult Microsoft at every possible opportunity but even Microsoft is not
quite THAT incompetent. (YET?)
Dude, there is definitely more to the story than what you were told. And I
bet the users are acting more stupid than they actually are. Go with what
you see. This was a fresh install of Windows on a formatted drive. Maybe
SP3 was (at least attempted) at one point. But that's not what got the hard
drive in the condition it's currently in.
But how you approach this problem now is going to be rather delicate. You
can't go accusing the users of destroying their own hard drive. (they might
be innocent anyway...maybe it was a 'helpful' cousin who happened to be in
the house at the time)
I'd suggest you do your best to search the hard drive for any useful user
files. After that, just finish the install of Windows including all service
packs and put any other software on there that they might use. Try to get
it to a useful state, even though at this point, the user data is probably
gone. -Dave
