Fixing a Computer Crash

Can A Virus Crash Your Motherboard?

2009-03-06T05:51:00.000-08:00

The other day I reminded myself how fragile computer systems are when I accidentally crashed my motherboard. I wasn't trying to write a virus -- but it had the same effect -- when I was testing a new version of firmware for a virtual server used for dedicated storage processing.

The errant firmware, residing in a host bus adapter card, manged to step on the BIOS which caused the Linux Kernel to panic. Fortunately, the Kernel was compiled with debug enabled and I was able to figure out what was going on.

After debugging the self-induced virus, the server would not boot or anything. It took a physical reset of the BIOS by removing the battery and reprogramming it.

The good news for you, is that even if a virus writer attempts to overwrite PCI registers, the operating system requires that you need to be in a supervisory mode before accessing these memory mapped regions. That is, it is not likely that a virus will crash your motherboard; however, it can crash your operating system.

Even Virtual PC Can Crash

2009-02-25T06:56:00.000-08:00

I run a lot of instances of Microsoft's Virtual PC to keep my personal and business records separate from my development workstation. I find that this separation very convenient where I the virtual disk drive with the OS and application data is small enough to fit on a single DVD.

This way the Virtual PC's are very portable where I can take the DVD and copy it to a new workstation and continue work in the event that I need to upgrade to a new workstation. Now reinstallation, no mess, just takes a couple of minutes to copy the file to the new machine.

But Virtual PC's do crash.

The typical scenario that you will run into is when you have automatic updates enabled or install new applications that modify the OS or drivers.

My last virtual crash happened when I installed this year's TurboTax. The new version required .NET 2.0 so it had to download upgrade from .NET 1.0. Remember, I keep these virtual drives small enough to fit on a DVD, so the install failed and left the drive with zero space.

I run the disk cleanup utility and now it has 600M which is plenty of room to install .NET and TurboTax. The .NET install always requires a reboot of the machine so it reboots and hangs on a corrupt pci.sys driver.

I don't know how the file went bad, but I couldn't even reboot in safe mode or recover from the Windows install disk.

The nice thing about Virtual PC's is that you can mount or add new drives. To fix this problem, I simply mount the drive to a different virtual instance and the bad virtual drive with pci.sys now shows up as D:. Copy the good pci.sys from C: to D: and the problem is solved.

All computers can crash but Virtual PC's are very easy to fix especially if you keep a backup on a DVD or make a copy just prior installing new drivers.

Bad Cables Often Crash Computers

2009-02-22T20:15:00.000-08:00

My last Linux dedicated server managed to die an ungraceful death. I was fortunate to repair it three times by replacing the motherboard twice and the power supply once extending the lifespan of the server well into six years of 24/7 99.99% up time. But I had to say goodbye to the server and go a different route.

Usually after 3 years, parts become obsolete and the only viable solution is to upgrade your server. A quick trip to Fry's confirmed this.

I didn't want to build a new server from scratch so I created a virtual Linux server on a workstation to keep things up and running until the new hardware was purchased and shipped from Dell.

But the thing is, the virtual server actually ran well enough -- and perhaps better -- than the old server that died. After all, the server was running in its own logical processor that had more memory and about 2x faster that the six year old server.

So I didn't have to go out and buy new hardware at the moment.

The wait paid off since I was able to get a half-dozen used servers for $50 each without the drive. A local University was selling the two year-old computers -- minus the disk drive -- to get a newer model.

Now with 6 servers, I had enough spare parts to keep the server running for at least 10 years.

I gotta admit that virtual servers are pretty convenient, but the extra memory and disk space needed to run on my workstation really puts a limitation on some of the video editing and other application resource hogs. So I was somewhat glad to move the server over to a dedicated system.

I put in a new 500GB WD SATA drive, installed Linux Ubuntu 8.04 server got everything configured, rebooted and started getting SMART drive errors on boot.

I opened up the box, checked connections, same thing. I was ready to return the drive to Western Digital since all it had on it was the OS. I pull the drive out and boxed it up and closed up the server but I noticed that the SATA cable was kinked.

I replace the SATA cable and put the drive back in and all is working good!

My Computer Crashed. Now What?

2008-04-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

Computers crash for lots of reasons. Usually it's an incompatible driver or virus that will crash your computer so I tend to shy away from automatic updates and don't ever download software unless I absolutely need it.

Even then, I'm really paranoid and run a virus scan to make sure my computer won't crash sometime in the future. And cross my fingers when install updates from Microsoft.

But with the right protection, your computer should never really crash due to driver updates or a virus. So, what really is the root cause of a crashing computer.

Component Failure

Eliminating the typical driver problem, your computer is probably crashing from a component failure. Fans fail, CPUs overheat and die, motherboards short, power supplies simply die. And yes, disk drives do fail.

Unlike ten years ago, computers are so fast and powerful today you probably will not have the need to buy a new computer unless you go an upgrade to Windows Vista. Keep that in mind, it very typical that you will have your computer for at least two years and perhaps longer.

In my case, my computer is over 6 years old and had the motherboard crash twice. The first time my computer crashed it would power up the motherboard only when I disconnected the disk drive. So I simply ran out to Fry's and bought a new drive.

Diagnosing Computer Crashes

Diagnosing a computer crash simply is very difficult to do. Usually your prognosis is wrong. My assumption of a bad disk drive was wrong because as soon as I plugged in a new drive, the crash still persisted.

The CPU had power so it wasn't the power supply. Or was it? Was the extra power to the drive causing a load issue? This time it was getting late, so I went to BestBuy to pick up a new power supply.

So proud, I installed the new power supply, double checked the connections then waited for it to boot up. You guessed it, same crashing symptom.

Now there are only three other possible things that could go wrong and I'm not batting 1000 right now. Very frustrated, the next thing to do is to get a new motherboard that will work with the CPU and memory I already have.

Now it's too late to go to the store and the computer crash will have to wait until tomorrow.

When you replace a motherboard for a computer that is over two years old, it's very difficult to find one that will work with your existing CPU and memory. After spending an hour looking at motherboard specs, I found one that would work with the processor and memory I had. The new Gigabyte motherboard would replace the presumably dead ASUS motherboard that was crashing.

Motherboards are simply a pain in the rear to replace since there are many connections that have to be right or things don't turn on. After carefully labeling all the old wires, carefully removing the CPU the new motherboard was installed in about an hour.

Most big league baseball players would love to bat 300, and I just succeeded in batting 333 cause the motherboard was the cause of the computer crash. Except, that now the Gigabyte BIOS sees the geometry of the drive different than what the ASUS did. Big problem.

One thing I did learn long ago was to partition disk drives so that your data is isolated from the operating system. That way if your computer or disk crashes, you can recover your data.

So all I had to do was reinstall Ubuntu on my Linux dedicated server and not touch my Windows and data partition. This is exactly what I did to fix my computer crash.

Now nearly four years later, my computer crashed again. I resolved back then that I would never go through this headache again and will show you exactly how I recovered from this crash and hopefully when your computer crashes, and it will, you can quickly recover from it.