Having taken the machine to Staples, I discovered that I did NOT, in fact, have to replace my hard drive. All that needed to be done was to run a little disk repair utility off the XP CD's, which I was not provided with when I bought the machine. This lowers my opinion of Cisnet tech support even further (or at least the dolt that I talked to). I was told by the Staples repair dude that MBR errors are common with fragmented drives, and running the defrag utility in every copy of Windows would mitigate the chances of them happening again. If errors like this are relatively common (given the circumstances) and so easy to fix in general, why the heck did the guy on the support line tell me to replace my bloody hard drive!!??
I've had some experience on the other side of a tech support line, so I feel for the people who do the job, but not for those who neglect the obvious troubleshooting steps. The first thing I would have done, confronted with an error of this kind, would be to ask "Have you run the MBR repair utility on the Windows XP CD?" If, as in my case, the customer did not have a copy of Windows, I would then suggest that they find a legit copy and use the MBR fix on it. I would never suggest such a drastic step as a hard drive swap or even formatting the existing drive until all other options had been exhausted.
Monday, March 5, 2007
Thursday, March 1, 2007
What the heck is an MBR?
Well, I suppose if you buy a computer the manufacturer of which you've never heard of, you should probably expect some issues. I recently bought a Cisnet clone from Staples during a little sale they were having. It was meant to replace the Dell laptop that I'd gotten cheap from Acadia, which had died on me in a series of progressively frustrating stages. I've had the Cisnet for little over a month now, and a few days ago I started getting weird system hangs. No error messages, no screen glitches, not even a handy BSOD to let me know something was really wrong. The thing just stopped responding. I was able to wriggle the cursor around a bit, but even that stopped once I got too click-happy.
After a manual reboot, things seemed OK for a bit, but the same thing happened about 15 minutes later. Both times I had been using Firefox, so I figured I'd try Internet Explorer to see if it was the browser that was giving me problems. The system hanged itself immediately upon opening a single Explorer window. Gah.
I'm not entirely discouraged at this point. I then try to do a system restore on the machine, which seems to do the trick, until about 4 hours later, it happens again. This time, when I reboot, I get an "MBR error" on start up (mbr = master boot record, something apparently very important), and it tells me to select a proper boot device! I manage to get to the Windows loading screen a few times, apparently by complete accident, but it just sits there, endlessly waiting for an instruction from a system that has apparently given up the ghost. Finally, I try the last resort - formatting the drive using my recovery disks. What happens? I get a "hard drive write error", which essentially tells me that the machine is well and truly fucked.
I did call Cisnet tech support, who were singularly unhelpful in the giving of explanations department. I run through the troubleshooting steps that I have taken with both level 1 and level 2 support and all I get is an instruction to have my drive replaced. Not to mention that the singularly unhelpful tech support people gave me no indication as to what might have actually happened to my machine, AND they spoke in nigh incomprehensible accents so I had a hard time telling what exactly they were saying.
While I accept that, yes, I am going to have to replace my hard drive, I really don't know why, and whether or not I can recover anything from my current one. The only explanation I can think of is that Cisnet makes shitty PCs. I'm going to keep the computer, because I can't afford to get a new one, but I wouldn't buy another Cisnet if I had other options. Luckily I have a 2 year warranty for the machine, which means a new drive won't cost me anything.
After a manual reboot, things seemed OK for a bit, but the same thing happened about 15 minutes later. Both times I had been using Firefox, so I figured I'd try Internet Explorer to see if it was the browser that was giving me problems. The system hanged itself immediately upon opening a single Explorer window. Gah.
I'm not entirely discouraged at this point. I then try to do a system restore on the machine, which seems to do the trick, until about 4 hours later, it happens again. This time, when I reboot, I get an "MBR error" on start up (mbr = master boot record, something apparently very important), and it tells me to select a proper boot device! I manage to get to the Windows loading screen a few times, apparently by complete accident, but it just sits there, endlessly waiting for an instruction from a system that has apparently given up the ghost. Finally, I try the last resort - formatting the drive using my recovery disks. What happens? I get a "hard drive write error", which essentially tells me that the machine is well and truly fucked.
I did call Cisnet tech support, who were singularly unhelpful in the giving of explanations department. I run through the troubleshooting steps that I have taken with both level 1 and level 2 support and all I get is an instruction to have my drive replaced. Not to mention that the singularly unhelpful tech support people gave me no indication as to what might have actually happened to my machine, AND they spoke in nigh incomprehensible accents so I had a hard time telling what exactly they were saying.
While I accept that, yes, I am going to have to replace my hard drive, I really don't know why, and whether or not I can recover anything from my current one. The only explanation I can think of is that Cisnet makes shitty PCs. I'm going to keep the computer, because I can't afford to get a new one, but I wouldn't buy another Cisnet if I had other options. Luckily I have a 2 year warranty for the machine, which means a new drive won't cost me anything.
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