Xion Community

The other day a friend asked me to get his bricked Zen Touch working again. A google search quickly put me in motion, as I learned I needed Windows XP with Windows Media Player v 10 in order to install the firmware. The computers available to me only had Vista and Windows 7 on them, so I thought I'd give 7's XP virtualization a try. It was an interesting experience, but I could not get the mp3 player working again through that.

Next step was to install a spare copy of XP onto a blank drive we had lying around. I threw the drive in my computer to be sure it was blank, and the idiot that I am, I simply rebooted and started formatting the drive. Bad choice. I should have disconnected the other drives. There was a power outage while I was formatting, and after that my computer refused to boot into any OS, showing a flashing underscore on an otherwise blank screen.

The rest of the day, I failed to get my PC to boot, clearing CMOS a few times and trying different hard drive configurations in desperation. The solution was simple but didn't come to me until the next day: run a startup repair from a Windows install disk. Problem solved, but a problem that should have been avoided in the first place. Lesson learned: don't try to format a drive while you have other hard drives connected and there's a severe thunderstorm outside.

OfficerMike07 Wrote:Lesson learned: don't try to format a drive while you have other hard drives connected and there's a severe thunderstorm outside.

How about just not using your computer at all, if there's a severe thunderstorm outside

heheh ahh good ol hindsight

Cliff Cawley Wrote:How about just not using your computer at all, if there's a severe thunderstorm outside

I live in Florida. There's always a thunderstorm (slight exaggeration).

Revised answer: get a UPS.

What a pain,eh? I just left the sansa plugged in for a few weeks, when I tried to unplug it this week I got a couple of blue screens and the sansa was frozen too

Luckily the sansa could be reset, and the pc recovered, but it reminded me to burn a couple more disks, I am always a week or two behind if I lose it all.

I hear ya OfficerMike...I keep everything on Storm Safe extenders and such. Especially because I live in Florida and there is almost a storm outside everyday...with the exception of this past few...but be prepared tomorrow my weather thingy says storms ahead...or at least rain....

And yes always format with only one drive plugged in, learned that the hard way too...I tried to format my secondary drive with my first one in and ended up with two XP Pros on one drive...

Early on, I was building like my 2nd or 3rd pc by myself. I finished a 233MHz system, and it was perfect, so I decided to wrap it up and throw in another 64MB of Ram. As I was plugging in the ram, a voice was saying "you just read that plugging ram into a pc powers some of them on."

Sure enough, as soon as I plugged in the ram, the pc came on, there was a small puff of smoke, and I watched as chips slid down off the motherboard, hehe.

You guys are talking about some weird ass stuff, that's for sure.

Lightning messing up a main drive when formatting a secondary? What? What?

RAM turning on computers? What?

Oh wait, the second one makes sense, there's a BIOS setting for that stuff. Never suspend to RAM, people.

As for the other one, well, either you messed something up or lightning is serious business.

But hey, cool stories, bros.

logokas Wrote:As for the other one, well, either you messed something up or lightning is serious business.

Care to give it a try?

logokas it's not the lightning messing with formatting it's while your formatting the computer is shut down and errors on a half-OS so you have to re-re-format.

The lightning is what shut down his computer, but if lightning hits the source directly it could cause the power supply to fry. Then you'll have to buy a new power supply...

but yea we had a little storm today but friday will bring more.

A customer called me to their house to look at their computer. When I got there, they told me the dog had bitten the mouse. The mouse cord dropped, shorted out and the computer was dead.
It took two of us about an hour, but we finally found a pinhole burn in the motherboard.

Last week, a customer dropped off a computer that wouldn't boot, and it finally came out that in a boyfriend/girlfriend fight he had yanked the plug on the pc while she was online.It reformatted ok.

Tonight he called me, it has one of those viruses you get from the free anti-virus software, it's all locked up again, hehe. Oh well, he said he has another pc for me to pay for the new reformat...

Really the worst one is that I built a nice pc for someone last year for free, and they left their window open in a bad rainstorm.

The PC was in an actual puddle of water on the floor. Horrified at seeing this, the person, (who shall remain unnamed), reached over and turned it on to "see if it still worked".

That must've been cool to watch.

I'd be scared to even try to boot a rained-on pc... even after it dried completely.

I wouldn't even bother...lol

I have the parts from that one, though I haven't taken it apart yet.

Typically, out of every two or three computers people throw out, I get to build one.On the average, I get two or three a month delivered to me. For the friends who help out but don't know about pcs', I just ask, "Please bring me the black ones, no more beige or tan", hehe.

It works out pretty well...