I did something dumb to my computer...

[Korioni]

I probably post more "plz help, i did a bad" threads than anyone on this forum, so sorry for that, but well... I did a bad. Again.


So, every once in a while I get bored and decide find something new that I can do with my PC. So a couple days ago, I decide to make it pretend to be a mac. To an extent, it worked. Got OSX installed and all that (unfortunately the driver for my motherboard was not included, so internet connection was beyond my grasp), then decided to reinstall windows (I am completely backed up on an external hard drive).

I run into some trouble along the way because I had had to reformat my internal hdd into GUID for OSX, but eventually got it to go into FAT32 through the OSX boot disk and made it compatible for Vista again. No problem.

I reinstall windows and find out that vanilla Vista doesn't have the driver for my external hdd so that I can get my recovery file off of it. Fuck. So I start downloading half a gig of update. I go to sleep and in the morning find a BSOD.

I can't get into Windows at all anymore. Not normally, with safe mode, or last known good configuration. Nor does my vista boot CD work. All of these options give me the windows loading screen, a flash of BSOD, restart.


Nothing on a google searches has helped worth a damn, mostly because I can't figure out how to get the BSOD to show up longer so that I can read the error (something with a "kernal") and I am unaware of a way to once again reformat my hdd with only my bios and dos.

Help?

[Frawdo]

Originally Posted by Korioni

I am unaware of a way to once again reformat my hdd with only my bios and dos.

If you have access to the DOS command prompt I think the command for format is Format. Maybe Format followed by the drive letter.

[Desidero]

If you have your Vista boot CD in the drive, it should boot from that before it even gets a chance to start loading Vista. Does the little animated "loading Windows" bar appear before the BSOD or does it BSOD when your computer is just doing the BIOS garbage?

[Vorph]

Odds are his BIOS is set to prioritize booting the HD over booting the DVD. It worked before because there was no valid OS to load on the HD, but now that there is it's using that instead of the Vista DVD every time. Go into the BIOS and change First Boot Device to CDROM in Advanced features.

You may also need to wait for the prompt that says something like "Press ENTER to boot from CD" or whatever and actually, you know, press enter. It appears shortly after the system POSTs.

[Korioni]

No, I have it set to boot CD as priority, then hdd. However it does the same thing as booting to the hdd. Small windows loading sign, bsod.


Also, if the command prompt is available to me, I don't know how to access it.


Right now I'm booting back into my Leopard disk... going to reformat from there. Unfortunately, it does not give the option for NTFS formating.

[Korioni]

Was able to erase and format as FAT in the Kalyway OS X disk. Then formatted to NTFS in Vista installation. Reinstalling now.

Anyone know how to avoid the BSOD this time around? I was asleep when it occurred, but I believe it was one of the drivers I downloaded from the half-gig windows update. But I need the update for drivers. GDI.

[Hachima]

Did you do any type of firmware modifications to your MB or HDD?

[Korioni]

Pretty sure no. The Kalyway boot hack I used to install OSX might have, but I can't find any mention of it doing so with a quick look at the guide on the insanelymac forums.

[Korioni]

Ok, got everything back to normal, sort of... got windows to install, recovered my harddrive(took 3 days) and that's all good. But now I fear I'm facing a hardware problem. It's slow as fuck now. Meaning that I'm having to browse this in google chrome because firefox is too heavy of an application. Every time I run something I get what I can only describe as frequent lag spikes. Chrome seems to be just beneath the threshhold as if I open up 2 tabs it starts lagging. Firefox lags immediately and for a good 30 seconds at a time. I can't even imagine what would happen if I tried to open up a game on this.

I can rule out internet connection as this is not exclusive to browsing applications, I'm pretty sure I'm completely up-to-date on all relevant drivers and no, I haven't opened up my case at all, so no fiddling with the hardware (of course with the exception of hard drive reformatting 5+ times). I'm using the same copy of vista as I was before all of this and as far as I can remember, I didn't change any BIOS settings.

Anyone know what's wrong? Google fails me again.

[Hippos]

Buy a new internal hard drive and throw away your old one.

[The Dauntless One]

Originally Posted by Hippos

Buy a new internal hard drive and throw away your old one.

Best advice ever. Not worth the trouble when you can get a fairly large hard drive for 50 bucks.

[Hachima]

What exactly do you mean by you "recovered" you hard drive? Are you running crap that was installed during a previous windows installation?

[Korioni]

I backed it up on an external hard drive before doing all of this, then "restored" it after reinstalling vista. So while I did have to reinstall everything, I didn't lose any files.

[Baradak]

Common slowness issues:

Chipset driver not installed.
Video driver not installed. <- not actually slowness, but chopiness when scrolling in webpages, etc.

Right click computer -> Properties. Open device manager. Make sure you don't have any missing drivers.

[Zeste]

I think I know what you're problem is with Windows. You need to find a open one in a tall building, and jump out of it.