After a night away from town, leaving my laptop on as I usually do, came back to find a black screen with computer still running. I suspect Windows Update ran and had trouble with something. Powered off, turned back on, and the startup hung as the OS was loading. Safe mode said the hang was at crcdisk.sys (I searched for this on the internet, but was not able to do much with it, as will soon be seen). I got my Vista installation CD and tried to boot from it, but it would not -- not even if I removed the hard drive from the computer. A friend had a similar laptop, and we exchanged hard drives; his would not boot in mine, but mine would in his (all data intact). I tried reseating the RAM; no good. Another friend lent me a Ubuntu boot cd, which also did not complete loading. Long story short, I can't get anywhere where I can do anything meaningfully useful. I can't get to a command line to run chkdsk, or to the internet to flash my BIOS, or to a text editor to write papers for school. The people I've talked with say probably the motherboard is bad.
I was able to get to an unhelpful IT fellow for a few minutes, and he was able to boot Windows 98 from CD, but he didn't let me do anything, or have the CD. I'm going to try to find one and see what I can do from it.
The questions I have:
Is it worthwhile to shell out for a motherboard? Would it be better to get a new laptop and transfer data?
Is it possible that only the BIOS chip is bad? Is it possible for me to just replace it, leaving the rest of everything in? Do I have ANY other options?
If I do get another motherboard, what sort do I need? Is it sufficient just to look for the exact same sort as I have? Is there any way to get one cheaper? I think I have a video card in there -- never really use it...
Anything else you can think of letting me know?
Thanks so much, y'all...
Tim
I was able to get to an unhelpful IT fellow for a few minutes, and he was able to boot Windows 98 from CD, but he didn't let me do anything, or have the CD. I'm going to try to find one and see what I can do from it.
The questions I have:
Is it worthwhile to shell out for a motherboard? Would it be better to get a new laptop and transfer data?
Is it possible that only the BIOS chip is bad? Is it possible for me to just replace it, leaving the rest of everything in? Do I have ANY other options?
If I do get another motherboard, what sort do I need? Is it sufficient just to look for the exact same sort as I have? Is there any way to get one cheaper? I think I have a video card in there -- never really use it...
Anything else you can think of letting me know?
Thanks so much, y'all...
Tim
