So recently I went to see a new client, that was having problems with her computer not booting correctly.  The computer was crashing to blue screen on boot right before the windows logon screen appeared.  There was also a strange message on the POST screen about “Diskette drive 0 seek failure” when you turned it on.  She had already took it to Geek Squad, so I was kind of a second opinion on this machine.

I’ve said this before to clients, and I will continue to say it now.  If your machine doesn’t boot, Geek Squad techs are incapable of diagnosing the trouble. The Geeks at best buy told my client that her hard drive was likely damaged, and that it would have to be replaced.  Following that, they gave her a total estimate to swap the drive with a fresh new one, reinstall her operating system, and maybe back-up her data from the old drive (which doesn’t make sense if it doesn’t work.)  All this for somewhere in the realm of $300-$400.  Meanwhile installing a fresh hard drive with a fresh OS install would have fixed her problem for probably about 10 minutes.  Ultimately, she would have been out 300 bucks or more and still had a problem with her  machine.

I looked at the machine, saw the disk 0 error, found that it was due to erroneous system settings in BIOS.  Then loaded the Vista recovery console, and saw that the C drive was indeed accessible and I could view all the files there. However, the system failed to boot.  As it turns out, I was able to trace the problem to a couple of bad, (and very cheap, mind you) memory modules.  Replace the modules, and Boom, system works again.  Client didn’t have to lose any data, and she didn’t have to pay for useless re-installation of her operating system.  Then again, go to FAIL repair shops, get FAIL results!

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