I keep a Thinkpad T30 docked these days at my desk running RDP and an IRC client and this afternoon I came home to it stuck at the "windows did not properly start last time" screen. It didn't matter what I selected the machine would do a brief drive access and then freeze.
I brought the machine up on the SP2 install CD's recovery console and chkdsk did it's magic as best it could. On reboot I could start windows normally and I saw the boot splash screen, then the screen went blank as it does before the video reinitializes and the machine hung again.
Started with the last known good configuration and it did it again. Tried safe mode and after agp440.sys (I doubt it was on that file but that was the last thing it had on the screen) all hard drive activity stopped and the machine hung. Finally tried booting to safe mode with a command prompt and again, no dice.
Suspecting either bad ram or the machine was failing to enable a VGA mode from the video card because like the last T30 the GPU had flaked out I fed it a Ubuntu 8.05 live CD and to my surprise it booted that no problem so the video was fine and running memtest found not issues with the ram either.
The only thing I can think of now is that for some random reason the machine crashed and something got corrupt. Before I take it as a loss I want to see if falling back to an older restore point might fix it somehow. I seem to recall that if you boot from the windows CD into the recovery console and run C:\windows\system32\restore\rstrui.exe you can restore from a previous point via command line but it says it can't find the application even when I can clearly see it in C:\windows\system32\restore. What gives?
I brought the machine up on the SP2 install CD's recovery console and chkdsk did it's magic as best it could. On reboot I could start windows normally and I saw the boot splash screen, then the screen went blank as it does before the video reinitializes and the machine hung again.
Started with the last known good configuration and it did it again. Tried safe mode and after agp440.sys (I doubt it was on that file but that was the last thing it had on the screen) all hard drive activity stopped and the machine hung. Finally tried booting to safe mode with a command prompt and again, no dice.
Suspecting either bad ram or the machine was failing to enable a VGA mode from the video card because like the last T30 the GPU had flaked out I fed it a Ubuntu 8.05 live CD and to my surprise it booted that no problem so the video was fine and running memtest found not issues with the ram either.
The only thing I can think of now is that for some random reason the machine crashed and something got corrupt. Before I take it as a loss I want to see if falling back to an older restore point might fix it somehow. I seem to recall that if you boot from the windows CD into the recovery console and run C:\windows\system32\restore\rstrui.exe you can restore from a previous point via command line but it says it can't find the application even when I can clearly see it in C:\windows\system32\restore. What gives?
<----Computer says I need more beer.
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