What the heck was that all about?

I went to show off my Roku music system to my wife and sure enough, it wasn't working. Perfect!

I went downstairs to see how the media center PC, which holds my music and photos, was doing. It was booting . . . and then rebooting . .  and then rebooting again.

Not good.

Fortunately, I had my music and photo collections backed up - that's rule #1. I keep my backup on a another PC using an inepxensive USB 2.0 removable drive. Not automated but I keep it up to date.

I dug around and found that Windows XP boot disk. I booted the PC off the CD and ran the repair console. I ran a DIR and the machine hung.

Not good!

OK . . . not panicking because I have my backup, but I run CHKDSK. This is a 250GB drive so it takes a while. I come back much later and CHKDSK stopped about 25% of the way through - unrecoverable errors.

Really not good.

I searched around on the web for something like CHKDSK. I didn't realize that Microsoft discontinued SCANDISK after Windows 98 (I am out of it!). Rather than plunking down $50 or so on some utility I thought I would give it another go. I ran it again and sure enough it made it all the way through.

However, it hung on Safe Mode boot on a weird WINDOWS/SYSTEM32 file. I copied that from one PC to this one using a floppy (remember those?) and rebootted.

Came up like a charm.

Now that the crisis has been averted I'm thinking about putting Vista Beta2 on this thing - might as well at this point since everything is backed up.

Points to remember here:

• Computers can crash at any time - this thing was not used hard and there must have been some freak glitch that corrupted that file.
• Back up your stuff - your wife will not forgive you if you lose the photo archive. Those external USB drives are cheap.
• Don't chuck that XP Recovery CD that came with your PC. I coudn't find the Sony one but I had a Dell one. Just put it in the drive - virtually every PC will boot from CD if there is something bootable in there.
• CHKDSK and such take a long time - this whole process took a few nights after the kids were asleep.