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i can troubleshoot the **** out of computers
this is a small story about an average minor modification to a computer.
it started out simply enough: a fan was making a knocking sound, my usual fix (hitting the top of the computer) wasn't working this time so i had to investigate which one was making all the commotion. i lean my ear into my case (it's never fully closed) and hope against hopes it's not the PSU fan. I call in my dad to hear it too and he confirms my fears, that the noise is coming from the power supply. so I start on my second usual fix of taking something apart and then putting it back together. That doesn't work. I then figure I could turn the grille around and that works but when I turn on the computer I'm confronted with an "overclocking is failed" message in red letters and it gives me some options which of course don't work.
being as nub as I am with overclocking I don't particularly understand why I'm getting this message when I haven't done any overclocking. My first use of Google shows me a page saying to reset the BIOS and it should work, well I reset the BIOS* and no longer got that message, but instead got a blue screen with error message 0x000000a5, which has something to do with the bios and the power settings so I figure I screwed something up in my fixing the fan's noise.
My next use of Google and everywhere was saying "flash the BIOS". "luckily" I had to flash a bios previously and had a device for doing that and was getting ready to go ahead with flashing when I notice that there's another common occurence with all the results: they happen when someone has 4 gigs of ram it happens but when they have 2 or less it goes away so i figure i'll try that. I put enough things back in the comp to make it run and only 1 stick of ram. Now it gives me yet another blue screen, this one with error message 0x0000007b (i think), something about a virus in the boot sector, now i know that my computer doesn't have a virus (maybe).
This is the point where I'd like to share my harddrive setup: I have a 400GB Seagate SATA HDD partitioned into 50/the rest, a 500GB seagate SATA HDD that so far has my ripped music and movies (shhhhh), and also I have a 400GB Maxtor? IDE drive that I ripped out of a computer i used to use (doesn't boot anymore and haven't tried to fix it).
Next thing was my dad suggested "hey, you got two drives that boot in here, right? try booting from the other one" so i unplug the sata drives and boot... only to get the virus message again so I thought to myself "hey self, if it's booting from a different drive, shouldn't something else happen?" "yes self, but maybe it's booting from the same drive as before". I then plug in only the SATA drives and proceed to boot normally (albeit slowly with 1/4 of the ram i had before) and concluded that when I reset the BIOS it defaulted to boot from IDE and something is screwy with booting from the IDE drive. I fixed that in the BIOS (selected exactly which drives to boot from) and now everything is fine.
*this is where I could have saved myself 2 hours and just checked the bootsequence
what I still don't understand is why I got the "overclocking is failed" message to begin with, ah well.
TLDR:
psu was noisy, had to change the bootsequence
this is a small story about an average minor modification to a computer.
it started out simply enough: a fan was making a knocking sound, my usual fix (hitting the top of the computer) wasn't working this time so i had to investigate which one was making all the commotion. i lean my ear into my case (it's never fully closed) and hope against hopes it's not the PSU fan. I call in my dad to hear it too and he confirms my fears, that the noise is coming from the power supply. so I start on my second usual fix of taking something apart and then putting it back together. That doesn't work. I then figure I could turn the grille around and that works but when I turn on the computer I'm confronted with an "overclocking is failed" message in red letters and it gives me some options which of course don't work.
being as nub as I am with overclocking I don't particularly understand why I'm getting this message when I haven't done any overclocking. My first use of Google shows me a page saying to reset the BIOS and it should work, well I reset the BIOS* and no longer got that message, but instead got a blue screen with error message 0x000000a5, which has something to do with the bios and the power settings so I figure I screwed something up in my fixing the fan's noise.
My next use of Google and everywhere was saying "flash the BIOS". "luckily" I had to flash a bios previously and had a device for doing that and was getting ready to go ahead with flashing when I notice that there's another common occurence with all the results: they happen when someone has 4 gigs of ram it happens but when they have 2 or less it goes away so i figure i'll try that. I put enough things back in the comp to make it run and only 1 stick of ram. Now it gives me yet another blue screen, this one with error message 0x0000007b (i think), something about a virus in the boot sector, now i know that my computer doesn't have a virus (maybe).
This is the point where I'd like to share my harddrive setup: I have a 400GB Seagate SATA HDD partitioned into 50/the rest, a 500GB seagate SATA HDD that so far has my ripped music and movies (shhhhh), and also I have a 400GB Maxtor? IDE drive that I ripped out of a computer i used to use (doesn't boot anymore and haven't tried to fix it).
Next thing was my dad suggested "hey, you got two drives that boot in here, right? try booting from the other one" so i unplug the sata drives and boot... only to get the virus message again so I thought to myself "hey self, if it's booting from a different drive, shouldn't something else happen?" "yes self, but maybe it's booting from the same drive as before". I then plug in only the SATA drives and proceed to boot normally (albeit slowly with 1/4 of the ram i had before) and concluded that when I reset the BIOS it defaulted to boot from IDE and something is screwy with booting from the IDE drive. I fixed that in the BIOS (selected exactly which drives to boot from) and now everything is fine.
*this is where I could have saved myself 2 hours and just checked the bootsequence
what I still don't understand is why I got the "overclocking is failed" message to begin with, ah well.
TLDR:
psu was noisy, had to change the bootsequence