Yesterday's dilemma

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lil' Dave
  • Start date Start date
L

Lil' Dave

XP HE /SP3. Closed down MS Age of Empires III game. Closed normally.
Selected shutdown. Took a 3 minute phone call. Afterwards, noticed a
selection for me the user was within a dialog box, nothing else. After
selecting that, PC said it was attempting standby. Same dialog box
reappeared, selected me the user. Cycle repeats over and over again. Tried
ctrl-alt-del and selecting shutdown, just sat there no progress towards a
shutdown. Waited 15 minutes. Shutoff the PC, DIW.

Turned on PC, normal RAM count, dual channel enabled, then, fast frequency
beeping, while rest of bios routine continued. Turned off the PC and
reseated RAM and CPU, all power and data cables, turned off printer and
external modem. Turned on PC, same symptom. Fast frequency beeping. Went
into bios setup. Noticed the selection for date was bouncing along
MM/DD/YYYY continuously. That's when it hit me, keyboard problem. I
slapped my forehead with the palm of my hand.

XP failed to get past mouse in startup routine, I have a infrared mouse that
lights up when moved or checked by OS during boot. The previous 2 XP images
restored had same symptoms. Both were verified after imaging and prior to
restoring. Selected a clean XP /SP3 installation image that I still had.
Restored fine, and booted okay. Installed MS Age of Empires fine.

Later, I booted to Windows Millenium. Inserted a USB thumb drive in front
of the PC. Did not work. Found that its connnector to the motherboard was
not connected. Reconnected. Thumb drive killed power to the PC when
inserted. Connector backwards, corrected. All good.

The only reasonable difference that I could find between the clean XP /SP3
installation, and the 2 from the last 2 weeks is that TurboTax 2008 and MS
..NET Framework 2.0 were not installed on XP /SP3 installation.. Whereas the
other 2 images has .NET Framework 2.0 installed and TurboTax 2008
deinstalled. My imaging program uses .NET Framework 1.0.
 
Forgot got to say I dismantled and cleaned the keyboard. Had debris in it
internally. Works fine now, the symptoms all disappeared. I did the check
bios setup including date/time, all normal. Fit that info before I tried
booting XP, and subsequent image restorations.

--
Dave


JS said:
Have you checked both the CMOS battery and the
mouse if it uses a battery?
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for the feedback Dave.
However remember not to feed your mouse
or keyboard any food ;-)

--
JS
http://www.pagestart.com



Lil' Dave said:
Forgot got to say I dismantled and cleaned the keyboard. Had debris in it
internally. Works fine now, the symptoms all disappeared. I did the
check bios setup including date/time, all normal. Fit that info before I
tried booting XP, and subsequent image restorations.
Click to expand...
 
I also resolved 2 problems found in using my imaging program. One is the
configuration file (text format) it creates must be deleted if the PC's
onboard windows partition size changes before implementing imaging program.
The imaging program does not overwrite a previously written configuration
file of the same name derived from the PC's description made by the user at
windows installation time. This will result in a restoration failure, and
if done, an image file check will fail. The other is the imaging program
must be reinstalled IF the .net Framework version is changed. An image file
check immediately after imaging will always fail if not done. Still using
DriveImage 7.0.
 
Sounds like Norton Ghost to a certain extent.

Question: Where is your imaging configuration file located.
Could you post a short piece of the file's contents.
 
Location is always the same as where I select location for saving image
file.

I won't post all of it due to its length, here's a sample of it. Its a
continuous string, not broke down like below.

<SDO clsid="{E097FFA2-58F0-4EDC-8489-4A4BD6230F26}"><Volume1 vt="13"
clsid="{C85BC36B-53ED-4760-A388-DE72B0A04119}"><VolumeType
vt="8">Simple</VolumeType><IsHidden vt="11">-1</IsHidden><IsActive
vt="11">0</IsActive><ImageFile vt="8"></ImageFile><Size
vt="21">7690604544</Size><Segment1 vt="13"


--
Dave
April 16th, 2009 Day 1 post Tea Party.
This day in history occurred:
Nancy Pelosi response was undignified per her allegation that such are
funded by right wing money big money and attended exclusively by right wing
extremists.
White House staff indicated that officially not recognizing the nation-wide
gatherings in any fashion.
Some news reporters were found attempting to goad responses from attendees
at the gatherings with response not filling their (some news reporters) TV
political needs. Too bad for them.
Woebama in Mexico. 2nd amendment rights being pinged again. Ignoring
locking down the U.S/Mexico border again.
We the people...
No political party or otherwise in that.
Locked signature to prevent subsequent historical revisionism.
 
Sorry I don't have a solution. The only thing
I can add is that on one of my computers that uses
an older version of Ghost the plain text file that
is located on the drive where the image backups
are stored sometimes requires that I delete it and
let Ghost recreate it the next time I start a backup session.
 
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