[Pallas]

Dear Kev
Many thanks for your willingness to help. I'm not very savvy about system troubleshooting, so I don't know what the TEC support codes or how I find/generate them, or even how I test the motherboard. Here is the info I have now, but I'd be grateful if you could guide me on how to find the other information that you need.

Thanks!

March 2006: My first STOP error was a blue screen of death about 10 minutes into a defrag. It had this message
STOP 0x0000007B (0x85E6B930, 0xC0000006, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE
If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:
Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured. and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer. Refer to your Getting Started manual for more information on troubleshooting Stop errors.

I couldn't do any of this, as the pc wouldn't do anything at all except reboot to the blue screen and the same error message.

With my computer specialist (he built the pc), we had to restore the pc from a Ghost back-up. The most recent one was corrupt (this is relevant now, as this happened again last week)(argh):

Application error: 29004
Read sector failure, result=1, drive=1, sectors 199270975 to 199271039. If this problem persists, contact Symantex Technical Support.

Eventually we had to restore the pc to a two-year-old version. Fortunately, my data is on a separate hard disk, so it was safe, apart from my iTunes and e-mail inbox.

April 2006: Tried GetDataBack, didn't work, so I had to reinstall all software, and while copying my music from my ipod to the hard disk, it crashed into reboot mode, with the error message: Missing operating system.

We tried changing the boot order in the BIOS, didn't work. In the end, we installed a new HD, and again had to restore from the two-year-old Ghost. We also upgraded the power supply, since I have always had suspicions about the power supply (a previous pc had its HD fried), and to ensure the pc would run OK with 3 internal HDDs.

Well, that was in June. I gradually reinstalled all my software, made a Ghost back-up which initially didn't work, then did work when saved to a different location. I checked it for integrity and it was fine. The pc worked more or less fine until last week (although I was reinstalling stuff very gradually as I'd sort of lost confidence...)

A few times, during reboot, I got a message that Windows (W2K) had to check the D disk partition for errors: ' NTFS file system repair'. But after running through loads of files, it would proclaim that all was fixed, so I thought no more of it.

Then last week, it all went wrong, I can't remember what went first. It was after I had downloaded the most recent Windows security updates. Also, I had been having problems with some copy-controlled cds that (unfortunately and unknowingly) I'd bought, so I had to uninstall their spyware and remove the songs from the hard drive. Then Thunderbird froze, the directory seemed corrupted, so I deleted it and re-installed it. When I rebooted to complete the installation of the Windows security patches and Thunderbird, it went into endless reboot loop. Last known good didn't work, neither did safe mode or repair mode. I tried to reinstall Windows, but the old was still there, even though upon booting it wasn't found.

Rebooted in DOS with Ghost, tried to restore using the June Ghost. Said it was successful but at reboot the pc gets stuck after device listing, ie it can't move onto starting Windows. The Ghost files were obviously incomplete in some way. Reinstalled Windows, tried again, found that Ghost had erased all my data. Windows stopped working again.

Now the pc is stuck in the dos-type screen early in the boot sequence, right after the device listing.