Jul 19 2008
Blue-screened!
I finally got to experience the infamous “blue screen of death,” the screen that tells you your computer is kaput. It was on my dear old Dell 4100, a truly obsolete monster I got way back in 2001; it came with 256mb of RAM and something like a 987mhz Pentium 2. To give you a sense for how ridiculously old this machine was, it came loaded with the awful Windows ME. Needless to say, I upgraded to XP Pro almost immediately (Millenium being perhaps MS’s most unstable OS ever), and I’ve tinkered with the thing on and off for years, adding additional drives, a new power supply (thanks for the non-standard sizes, Dell!), sound card, video card, etc. I long ago partitioned the primary HD and dual booted it with Ubuntu (I think I started with 4.10). Of course, the machine was fundamentally hobbled because its motherboard can only take 512mb of RAM, so every year it seemed to get slower and slower as all the programs piled up and seemed to require the now standard 2gb. Ah, well. I really learned how to work the inside of the box on this old monster, and – really – 7+ years is not that bad.
In terms of diagnostics, I think it’s a motherboard failure. I have two HD’s on the thing, the primary with multiple partitions for the OS’s, and a second HD just for backups. I backed up yesterday morning, which means I should have lost almost nothing. But the computer does not see HD 1 or 2, which leads me to believe that its a motherboard problem rather than catastrophic hard drive failure (on two drives? simultaneously?). None of the detectors I used (BIOS, Seagate’s own drive diagnostic program, Norton Ghost, or an Ubuntu Live CD) even saw Primary Master or Primary Slave, but all these programs recognized the dual DVD/CD drives. I think it’s the motherboard IDE connection. I still have to try switching out the connections, but maybe this won’y work either. That means I’ll have to go out and get an USB to IDE drive enclosure (yes, this monster came in the days before widespread SATA HDs). Maybe, if I’m really lucky, it’s just a failure of the IDE connector, in which case I might even be able to get the old bastard up and running again, blue screen be damned! But I’m usually not that lucky.
In any case, the blue screen is really powerful as a mourning signifier. she was on the computer at the time and she came into the living room, saying “There’s something wrong with the computer.” Oh, what now, I thought. As I arrived in my office and saw the blue screen of death, my heart just sank. I do not fear (fingers crossed!) that I lost that data, but – dammit – this little monster was like a friend, and it’s sad to see it die like that…
I too have been vexed with the Blue Screen of Death on two separate occasions on the very laptop I’m using. Granted, this laptop is older than death, and has changed hands more times than I know (or care to know), but so far the second blue screen has not yielded the expected outcome of sudden death. The first time, however, required a new hard drive.
Godspeed!