My Dad's Cursed

This is unbelievable. All this time, I've been talking about all the problems I've been having with Dell. It's not so much the fact they shipped a lemon that made me mad, it's mainly their lack of support and insane policies. So to make sure my dad to wouldn't have to have the Dell mess up on him for the thousandth time, we swapped the dyno and office computers. Now the Dell is in the office with all the office work on it. That stuff is easier to backup and isn't as big of a deal to lose as my dad's information is. The computer we moved to the dyno room is a Compaq.

Let me put emphasis on this -- we've never once had any problems with the Compaq. It has worked great for us. The day I moved it in the dyno room, it was running fine. By the end of the day, I was setting up Microsoft Backup on it to automatically backup files. I had simply restarted the computer. While Windows was shutting down, I walked away for about a minute and came back. It told me Windows had not been shut down properly. I didn't understand why until Windows tried to start up again. It would get about 2 or 3 seconds into the boot process, and then the computer would just restart itself. It didn't matter what I did, it continued to restart itself.

Right before restarted each time, there was a blue screen that would pop up for a split second. I grabbed my dad's camera and tried to take a picture. After several tries, I got captured it. The whole message doesn't print on the screen, but it's enough information to be useful. It says "BOOT VOLUME UNMOUNTABLE". Immediately I thought "oh no, now the hard drive is going in this computer too!". According to Microsoft this can either be a bad cable, or it can be a damaged file system. Microsoft also mentioned if the EBX register has 0x32 as it's value, it's the file system. There are enough pixels in the image to see what the EBX value is, and the value is 0x9C. What this means, I'm not sure. I'm going to look at it more when I go back to work on Monday.

I hooked the eMachines computer in the dyno (the computer he had before he bought the Dell). It's ironic because as many people who have said eMachines is junk, it's the one computer my dad has never once had a bit of trouble with. What he wants to do at this point, I am not sure. I'm thinking he might be so sick of computer trouble that he just would want to stick with his old computer. It's not as fast and it's showing age a little, but it still works.