Upon arriving at work yesterday morning, I was greeted by a blue screen with a KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR message and a STOP: 0X00000077 code. As I rebooted the box, I received an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME with STOP: 0XC0000185. Some quick research on another computer showed that these codes were indicative of a bad hard drive. And Dell Diagnostics returned error code 0142 with status byte 78 when it checked the hard drive. I called Dell with error and I should have my replacement hard drive today. Ironically the previous day, I cleaned up my box, placing all my essential files onto my share on the san. There were a few older backups and software installations that I didn’t save, but I can always redownload the software. It has been very annoying and counter productive the last two days to use an older underpowered workstation that I found under a desk. It is frustrating not to have all the tools I normally use frequently not installed. This situation has made me think harder about experimenting with VDI. Having a virtual desktop stored on our san would be very helpful. I could install the tools I typically use and set it up just the way I want to without have to worry about hardware failure. This has been the first drive fail on a workstation I have used that was no longer usable at all. I attempted to read the drive with a Knoppix cd and was unsuccessful. Makes me wish I could have RAID on my workstation similar to the servers I manage. That way I could avoid having to resetup my work environment.
Archive for the 'Hardware' Category
After my laptop had some major problems, I decided that it was time to build a new computer. I am always reading about what the current hardware is. I wanted to build the best computer I could, however I had to do so on a pretty tight budget. Of course after using my laptop as my only computer for the last three years, just about anything would be faster. I also needed to get a nice monitor since I didn’t have anything but my broken laptop screen. So I did a bunch of research, found what I wanted, and then waited for my tax refund to come in. If you are looking to build a new computer, on a tight budget, I think this one works pretty good.
I had a major problem with the LCD display in my Dell Inspiron 600m laptop this past weekend. Everything was working fine all day Saturday. That night however, I went to use my laptop and the screen started acting weird. It looked fuzzy and things were flashing around. So I restarted the it to see if things would clear up. They only got worse. I shut down the laptop and decided to give it a day of rest. Sunday night I booted it back up. The screen was really bad now. The dell logo was all over the place on the boot screen. And when it got to Windows all that showed up were some vertical bars. I decided to take the lcd display apart and see if anything was loose, or if I could spot any other problems. I never figured out what was wrong, but I figured I would take some pictures and write an article about how to disassemble a Dell laptop lcd display.
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