Computer does not start

I promised to discuss the computer issues I have been having for some time now and so here I am to blog about it in hopes of educating others on what to do when they face a similar situation. I will first talk about the major issue which was essentially the show stopper as far as my computer was concerned. Here is a little background information. One fine day I was copying some files and I noticed that my computer screen froze up – there was no visible dynamic activity on my computer screen and the hard disk activity LED which usually blinks constantly especially when copying files was not lit. I figured the computer was stuck and in order to recover from this problem I did a hard reboot of my computer i.e., powered down and powered back up by pressing the power button on the computer. After doing a hard reboot of my computer every time I started up my computer I would get a message that the computer was not shutdown properly and I was presented with the screen shown below.

So, no matter what option (Safe Mode, Normally, etc.) I selected to start up my computer it simply would not start. The computer would come up to the point where the progress bar is shown as the operating system is loaded and then the computer would crash. The computer would then attempt to start back up automatically only to crash again. It got stuck in this seemingly perpetual cycle of almost starting and crashing. When it crashed the computer would display a blue screen with some error messages but only for a fraction of a second so there was no way for me to see what the messages were and what went wrong in order to troubleshoot the error. See the video below to see what I am talking about.

I had the “Startup and Recovery” settings set in the computer to display the error message every time the computer crashed and not restart automatically and I would have imagined that with this setting the computer would display the error message and wait for me to tell it to restart but that did not happen. I guess the setting was worthless in this case perhaps because the computer never got to completely load the operating system in order to enforce the setting. In any case I was in a limbo not knowing what was wrong and obviously if I don’t know what was wrong then I cannot fix it. But then again I realized you don’t have to know exactly what was wrong as long as you have an idea of what could be wrong and then troubleshoot the problem. My first attempt at resolving the problem was to recover my computer using the computer manufacturer provided recovery CD. But it was not long before I realized that I did not have a recovery CD for my computer. I was really upset because here I was stuck with a computer that does not start and the manufacturer did not provide a recovery CD. I mean would it hurt the computer maker to provide a CD along with the computer? Anyway my next attempt to fix the problem was to use a backup image I made of the computer some time back. As luck would have it I deleted the backup image recently to make some free space on my external hard drive thinking that nothing could go wrong with this computer. So much for that expectation. My final attempt to fix the problem was to research on the internet. Although my research on the internet was scary it was however fruitful in the end. I read many suggestions on how to fix the problem almost all of them were complex and could potentially screw my computer all together if things went south. Fortunately for me I figured out that the simple solution was to fix the Master Boot Record (MBR) and run a check disk with the fix and repair option. After running check disk, my computer was finally able to boot up successfully. There were some lessons I learned in this experience.

Here are my tips to others.

· Always have a backup image of your computer

· Have a recovery CD of your computer

· Run check disks from time to time

· Keep calm, don’t panic

· Always be skeptical and about information on the internet

I hope my experience will serve as a wakeup call to others and prevent others from going through what I had to go through with this issue. Until next time, bye.

Technorati Tags: Computer crash,computer does not start