Aww...
Cordelia ,'You're Welcome'
Buffistechnology 3: "Press Some Buttons, See What Happens."
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Hah.
Hah, indeed.
So, I've got something weird happening on my media machine. It's a six year old Win 7 machine that I set up a year and a half ago with an SSD boot drive and two large hard drives. Today when I went to boot it up, I got a "Loading Windows XP" splash screen, then a blue screen o' death followed by an instant reboot. Multiple reboots produce variations of the same thing. The thing is, the Win 7 installation was wasn't an upgrade. There shouldn't be any Win XP boot detritus, right?
I filmed one of the boot failures to capture the BSOD as it zipped by, but it was generic message, without any error info. I suspect that it must be a problem with the SSD, but it's showing up in the post sequence.
I tried doing a repair from an install disk, but no joy. I'm still getting the same routine. Any thoughts?
For fun go to your command line and issue the trace route command for the domain name 'bad.horse'
I will be posting this elsewhere...
I have zero Windows help, but hi DX!!
Hi meara!
So, this morning I started diagnosing, after first checking to make sure that it still was booting to an XP splash screen. It was. So I opened up the box and started disconnecting things to try to isolate the bad actor. I disconnected the two storage drives, then booted up with just the SSD, and lo, there was a Win 7 splash screen and then the desktop a few seconds later. Knowing the SSD was good, I then reconnected the 3 TB media drive, and that worked. So I figured that it must be the last drive (500 GB) that was problematic. But when I reconnected that one, it worked, too. WTF?!?
The upshot is that the machine is working again simply by virtue of unplugging and replugging two hard drives, which makes little sense. This is why I hate computers.
It wasn't all for nought. I'd picked up a 4 TB drive a little while back for an upgrade, so as long as the machine is opened up, I might as well install it.
DX -- In case the problem ever happens again -- is the SSD boot drive plugged into the lowest numbered SATA port? I had lots of trouble successfully booting my PC until I rearranged the plugs so that the booting SSD was plugged into SATA slot #1.
Thanks, Jon, I did have to switch it to SATA port 1 back when I installed it, so that wasn't it this time. I think what happened here is that the BIOS lost track of the SSD somehow, and instead got fixed upon the old 500 GB drive I had in there which used to be the boot drive when it was an XP machine. That's the only thing I can think of, and it's sort of similar to what you're describing.