busman's holiday

As mentioned yesterday, the weekend was something of a Busman's holiday.

Quite a few years ago, I built my sister a PC. The details of how aren't really relevant, but it essentially found itself in my Dad's possession as his machine.

Well a few weeks back he mentioned that it had essentially 'gone wrong'. One of the things he mentioned essentially sounded like the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, but it's incredibly difficult to diagnose these sorts of things over the phone, so I agreed to have a look when I visited.

Well, when he showed me it in action it was kinda obvious things had gone distinctly pear-shaped as it was indeed giving the BSOD and then immediately re-booting, so it was locked in and endless loop.

One thing that instantly struck me was that it was giving 2 separate options for booting windows, which was very odd. But it also looked like it might be having trouble accessing something properly, as that's what the BSOD message implied.

So my first port of call was the BIOS set-up screen. The last time I encountered a similar problem the RAM was unseated and a quick look at the BIOS screen can instantly show you what's connected and active, etc.

But unfortunately there was a BIOS password, so I couldn't have a look around. Which in itself was weird, because I didn't set a BIOS password on the machine. However, I knew that my sister had had some problems before and so maybe whoever fixed those problems had put the BIOS password on.

So we tried a few things and failed. Then we tried calling my sister, but she didn't know.

Then something odd transpired. My dad recognised the BIOS screen.

This stunned me, and initially I didn't believe him because I couldn't see how he would have known how to get there. But he clearly did recognise it. This would later feed into what had apparently happened, but more on that later.

So anyway, I took the case apart and reset the BIOS. I had to set a few things up again of course, but it also showed me everything was properly connected.

Of course it didn't solve the problem, because the real problem was that he'd essentially tried to re-install windows.

Again, quite how he's managed to set it so that it'll boot from the CD I don't know, but he did. Now installing windows is of course a fairly straightforward thing, but of course you wouldn't normally try to install it onto a machine with it already on without either putting it over the top or deleting the old one.

He hadn't done that. Indeed, it looked like he'd stopped the installation part of the way through.

Of course I'm sure this is probably all reversible, but the easiest thing to do was just blank the machine and re-install windows, so that's what I did. I asked whether there was anything important on the machine or if my sister had left anything, but he seemed fairly sure it was all okay.

Really this isn't a bad thing anyway, because he's just started an 'introduction to computing' type course and a clean install with few distractions is therefore a good thing.

There was a slight complication though as it meant buying a new copy of office. We got a copy at PC-World for convenience's sake, but when I got back I couldn't install it. This was because the version of XP was so old it needed Service Pack 2 installing.

My dad is planning to get broadband, but luckily I happen to have SP2 on a CD, so I sent that down to him and he seems to have installed it okay.

The real plan, and why he's interested in doing this is he wants to get into digital photography. That's why we bought him a digital camera for his birthday and obviously, being more PC-savvy is part of the next step - he can hardly learn how to adjust photos if he doesn't know how to turn the machine on!

Now as we were going on throughout the day the truth actually emerged as to what happened. Basically, he wanted to adjust the user accounts.

As mentioned, the machine was my sisters and her friends also used it. Therefore, he was logging in under their accounts, so what he wanted to do was remove them and/or add himself.

Unfortunately, he had no idea how to do that.

But what he did stumble across was the BIOS. Whether he adjusted anything else I don't know, but I'm guessing he saw the "set password" and thought that was how you did it, so he set a BIOS password by accident.

Then, for some reason that I still can't quite figure out he's tried to use the Windows XP CD. This has lead to him part-installing a new copy of XP, which was not finished properly but also broke the existing XP install.

I've always said that doing is the best was of learning, but I guess sometimes a little knowledge is needed before attempting stuff.