Help weve crashed

[apsphotography]

Hi everybody,

I know this is nothing to do with photography but,

if any body can help i would be most grateful/

Here goes.

my wife was working on her computer when it froze, a black screen followed with nothing happening,

when she tried to reboot all you get is the pentium 4 blue screen


any ideas how to get it to reboot,


We have tried turnig off and disconnecting from the main power supply but each time when we turn it back on it goes straight back into the intel screen.

[jknights]

Astro,
Can you answer the follwoing:

What make of computer
Operating System
Service packs ?


This stuff is difficult to do without hands on !

[apsphotography]

Thanks for your reply jonathan

It is a computer by DVC they are a video editing co,

we use it for editing wedding video's

The OS is windows 2000 professional

pentium 4 1.7ghz

No service packs have been down loaded

[photoworks]

There are some reasons that can crash a computer.
Maybe a misconfiguration or a malfunction of the graphics card (very possible)
Have you tried to boot your PC in Safe Mode?
If it's working in this mode,you have to check out your peripherals(cards).
Maybe a virus (use the emergency boot disk of the antivirus programm, if there is one)

Anyway you have to install Service Pack 4 for Win2000, as they become more stable and reliable.

Vasilis

[apsphotography]

thanks for your reply vasilis

how do we go into safe mode,

when we get the intel sign on the screen it wont let us do anything

do we have to press any thing during the initial starting up

[robinp]

Its getting stuck during the BIOS POST phase and its been set up so the interesting bits are hidden from your view.
Almost certainly an internal hardware failure - RAM or a peripheral card, time to take it to a professional repair man!

Sorry to give you bad news,

Cheers, Robin

[apsphotography]

thanks robin,

its weird she's been editing all day and then all of a sudden it just crashed,

We are having it rebuilt and upgraded but she needs to get all of her files off it first,

Do you think that her files/work will still be okay ,its very worrying

Steve

[Eddie the Gnat]

Unless the hard drive has failed catastrophically there's a very good chance that your data's fine. I would suggest sending it back to DVC - I've dealt with them in the past (about 4 years ago) and found them to be incredibly honest and helpful - making sure that they are aware of the important files you need to recover.

Best of luck,

Eddie

[Wichita Wayne]

A pro can get all your data files off of the disk but it is best not to mess with the thing till that is done. They will probably take the hard disk out and recover it with another computer. The description you gave indicates that you have a hardware failure that is probably not the hard drive. It sounds like the thing is stopping when it fails one of the "Power On Self Tests" (POST routine). If I had the computer with me I could probably figure it out but not online. Contact DVC and see what they recommend. It would be nice it the repair was under warrenty. Be sure to watch what the repair will cost because it might be better to buy a new computer.

[apsphotography]

thanks wayne,

we probably wont bother getting it repaired because it is being re-built completely by DVC anyway, the only reason we have been hanging on is that there are some upgrades becoming available for Adobe software to work with Storm.

all we really need to be able to do is make sure we can get all the data of of it. which we would really like to do ourselves.

If we can just get it to boot up we could do this and then send it for a rebuild.



Steve

[photoworks]

For Safe Mode:
By pressing F8 (depending on the BIOS version and type) while PC is booting, just before Windows start loading.
You didn't mentioned if you have your hard disk partitioned, for instance : Disk C:, Disk D: or so.
Windows use Disk C by default for the OS, so if you store your data to Disk D and there is a problem with the OS the data will not be lost as they exist in another partition.

The bad news are if the hole drive has crashed completely.....

-------------------
Vasilis

[robinp]

Wishing you good luck with the repair/rebuild - there's a very good chance its not hard drive failure that caused the breakdown but even if it was there are firms that can recover data from a broken drive (at a cost!).

A reminder to all of us of the need for regular backups!

Cheers, Robin

[Wichita Wayne]

Before you can recover the hard disk you would need to remove it from the current computer and install it in another computer or an external drive case that will plug into another computer. I have a little device that allows me to plug a bare drive (either a laptop or a desktop drive) into another computers USB port. Then I use all of those old drives that have been upgraded to bigger and faster drives. I use them as backup drives with Norton Ghost. In fact I used an old 30 MB drive to back up my laptop just about 4 hours ago. We also use external drives mounted in their own cases on a daily basis.

If you can get the drive out of the computer and can mount it in another computer there are a lot of internet sites that give you pretty detailed instructions on what to do.

[Rockyw]

apsphotography
If I may give a little advice, never put the operating system on a data drive. I edit video also. I have 6 hard drives in my PC. One 40 gig as the operating system and program drive, the other five are project drives. I back up the operating drive with Norton Ghost on a DVD and if it gets corrupted I can install the operating system and all programs in about 15 minutes. With all the programs and updates I have the job used to take 6 to 8 hours. The same with image files, never have data that you need on the same drive the operating system is on. Some partition a drive, I prefer a single drive as C drive. Good Luck

[Serge]

Originally posted by apsphotography
Hi everybody,

I know this is nothing to do with photography but,

if any body can help i would be most grateful/

Here goes.

my wife was working on her computer when it froze, a black screen followed with nothing happening,

when she tried to reboot all you get is the pentium 4 blue screen


any ideas how to get it to reboot,


We have tried turnig off and disconnecting from the main power supply but each time when we turn it back on it goes straight back into the intel screen.


I run a Pinnacle DV500 card for my video editing on a Win2000 sytem, I have experienced similar crashes, but have found it usually due to installation of some new software, and therefore, conflicting DLL's usually. There has been some good advice given here, will upgrade to SP4, using SP 2 currently. My video worksatation is not online, too risky, and antivirus software slows things down. Good luck with the rebuild, been there.

[Wichita Wayne]

If you can get to the "Setup" routine then set your computer to boot the floppy. If you cannot get into the "Setup" routine then you do have a hardware problem. If you can do the setup for floppy boots then try to boot with a DOS disk and see if it starts without errors. If your hard disk is formated with NTFS, which it probably is, then you will not be able to read it. If it is formated with FAT32 then you can. If the computer starts without any errors then the problem might be like Serge suggests, a software problem that can be fixed.

[apsphotography]

I'D like to thank ,

Jknights, photoworks, robinp, eddie the gnat, whichita Wayne, serge, rockyw who all tried to help yesterday with a problem on our video editing computer.

thank you all for your help and advice.

A technician has had a look at it this morning, and confirmed that a hard drive has gone down, the one with the OS on it.

also the fan which cools the motherboard was not connected,
hencethe reason that it has been crashing in the past.
Its debateable wether it has become disconnected or if indeed it ever was connected. that we shall never know.
anyway its gone of to be rebuilt now so i just hope it will be okay when it returns

Again thanks a lot for your help


Steve

[jknights]

apsphotography

Make sure they put a new drive and configure it so that he drive with your wedding files is a secnd drive. When all is up and running you can then copy the data from the old drive onto your new drive.

I am assuming that your data (wedding) is on the second drive !!!
Hope so for your sake.

The cooling fan for the motherboad - I presume that you mean the CPU cooling fan.
If this has been disconnected for any length of time it would explain the crashes, occasionally they get disconnected (by mistake or intentionally if there is not enogh space in the case and things need to be undone to get new bits in) usually when fitting a second hard disk or when somebody is fiddling inside.. Most mondern motherboards 'talk' to the CPU and monitor its temperature. If it gets too hot it closes down the CPU (your PC apparently crashes). In extreme cases it could be that the CPU is damaged. If the fan is reconnected hopefully all will be well but if the computer keeps crashing you may also have a damaged CPU. Time will tell.

Hope all is sorted quickly.

One small word of advice.
Get a disk caddy (£20 from Maplins http://www.maplin.co.uk) and put your data on a large 200GB disk into it.
If your machine crashes again you could swap it out into another machine with a disk caddy and carry on. Also when that drive is full you can then just buy another caddy with another disk and cold swap it. Cold swap is swapping with Power OFF.