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May 29th, 2007
 | 11:12 am
XP reinstall has hit a few snags. I boldly (or foolishly) ran Windows Update to get all of the various patches and fixes. That ran for quite a while, downloaded a bunch of stuff, and seemed to be installing it ok. However, after the next reboot, all was definitely not well. I did get a login prompt and logged in, but then got an error message from explorer.exe - "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005)" (twice). Got task manager up, but couldn't run explorer from that either. Can get a command prompt, can't run regedit or the system restore utility though. Tried booting into safe mode, but that also bombs out. Next step is to try a repair installation and see if it fixes things.
The more worrying issue is that the new hard drive seems to have the same "clunk-whirrr" issue that the old one had - and four of the files that were downloaded as updates are giving i/o errors. This leads to two conclusions - first, that the i/o errors broke one of the updates, which in turn messed up some important system file somewhere, and second, that maybe the IDE controller on the motherboard is having issues, at least for that channel (the Windows drive is the only one on the first IDE controller, the Linux drive and DVD writer are on the other controller).
(and in reply to  kremmen's comment on my other post - I did check SMART stats on the "bad" drive while I had it hooked up to Linux (post-freezer), and ... I can't recall exactly, I think it had some errors, but didn't seem to be in immediate peril)
As it happens, I have a spare motherboard, identical to the current one, so I could conceivably swap everything onto that, reinstall Windows again and see how things go. That's starting to sound like a lot of fiddling about, though ...
Current Mood:  geeky
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