Fixin' my rig....Part 1

After four+ years of uninterrupted use, my HP Dv1000 laptop with Windows XP SP 2 finally gave out....sort of. But there's a little background to the story.

Our home desktop computer had suffered a massive virus infection (it's was primarily used by the kids) and I had never bothered to properly secure it. In the last year, it had started displaying a BIOS config error whenever it booted up (something about a change in the memory) , and you had to press F1 to continue. Unfortunately, I had apparently set a CMOS password way back when I got the system, and could not remember it. So thought I would just pop open the case to remove the CMOS battery and thereby clear out the old password. The thing I didn't count on was the system not booting after the CMOS battery was put back in. I originally bought the system from Fry's, so I didn't know details about the guts of it. With the case now popped open, I was able to find the motherboard ID info, and learned it is a ECS Photon PF1. A quick google session and I was dismayed to learn that it is a pretty crappy mobo. Wonderful. So now I have a low quality, non-booting, beep-at-me-during-powerup, non functioning motherboard.

So while I decided what to do next, the kids needed a computer to do their homework. Previously, I had been the only user of my DV1000 laptop, but the kids would now need access. So I gave my wife the password to my account and told her to log me in when the kids needed to do homework. BIG mistake! Since I generally visit "Legit" websites, I had been able to get along with using the old anti-virus from my System Suite v5 install from many years ago. The only kicker was that I had to manually update the pattern files, but it worked fine for me. Not too long ago, I had decided to update the system to use a more recent set of firewall/Malware tools. This too turned into a disaster (subject for a later post), but suffice to say that by the time my kids started using the portable, in was in a "less than optimum" security state.

Several weeks later, I went on a golf vacation to Palm Springs. During the trip, my wife called and told me that the laptop would no longer boot. When I got home I check it out, and sure enough, the system would hang while attempting to load a file called "mup.sys". While I had no idea why Sesame Street was trying to load on my computer, a bit of time Googling did not help me figure out a quick fix. I didn't want to lose some of the files I had on my hard disk, so a clean format/reinstall was not what I was after....

A bit more research, and I learned about a tool with the ability to create an XP boot disk with anti-virus and a hoard of other tools that I thought my help me out. Enter Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD). Assuming you have access to an XP boot disk (or iso image), you can create a Windows boot disk with just about every tool that could possibly help fix a non-booting system.

With my new cool tool disk in hand, I was able to boot and get access to the hard drive (Note: UBCD does take a while to load). Knowing that the hard disk had the original XP Pro with SP 2 image from the vendor (including all the extraneous garbage they load - does ANYBODY use this stuff???), I simply wanted to get my data files, pictures, etc from the hard drive. Just to satisfy my curiousity, I first did a virus scan to see if the boot problem was virus related. The scan came back clean, so the next step was to see if the UBCD disk would allow me to attach an external USB hard disk, which I intended to use for saving off my files from the dead portable. I plugged in the external USB drive, and VOILA! - it recognized it! So now I had (courtesy of UBCD) access to the portable hard drive and an external USB hard disk connected that I could save off my files to.

Fast forward a couple of hours, and I was able to save off all the files I wanted to the external drive. With the last remnants of desired content removed from the laptop, it was time to kiss the original disk image goodbye. The only remaining step was to decide my strategy for the system rebuild and what I would load....