Tag: fix

Vista weirdness

So Wednesday, Windows (Vista) on my laptop did an Xbox (crapped itself and died). Woke it up from standby, started up, black screen. Forced the power off and started it up, black screen for ages, Windows finally starts, Event Log/Sidebar/Wireless all kaput.

Some Googling later, and found this. Long and short, run NETSH WINSOCK RESET CATALOG and restart. Job done, it all works again.

New Hard Drive == BSOD == Brown Trousers

On Friday I got a Seagate ST3500320AS – 500GB, SATA2, 32MB cache – and used it to replace the 250GB IDE Western Digital as the Windows boot drive (removing a 120GB WD which used to be the boot drive and became purely for storage when I built this machine a little over 2 years ago).

Used Acronis True Image to copy one drive to the other to dodge installing Windows (last installed 25th April 2006!). All goes well except the next morning, the machine’s back at the login prompt. Fair enough, maybe I restarted the machine and forgot to log in. Until the same happened the next morning…long story short, it turned out that ntbackup.exe was using Volume Shadow Copy, and for whatever reason that made the machine chuck a BAD_POOL_HEADER BSOD.

Much Googling suggested a driver issue, and eventually I found this post on techspot.com, with the following:

  • open regedit from the run menu.
  • goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlClass{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE-10318}
  • Export this key so you have a backup of it. (I know this solves the MSbackup but I don’t know if other problems will pop up.)
  • delete the key “UpperFilters”
  • re-boot
  • My computer did a “Found new hardware” when it re-booted and required another re-boot.
  • Go ahead and re-boot

Worked fine, so I’m happy.