My computer just went tits up

I don't know what's going on. I uninstalled a utility I haven't used in a while and rebooted afterwards. When my pc came back up my mouse wasn't working properly (I could move it but couldn't click anything). I put it on the charger and plugged in an old mouse and rebooted again as it wasn't being detected. The pc came back up but now everything was going south.

The xp theme was changed to the classic one. I went into display properties to change it back but the jump box only had one choice - classic.

The desktop was stuck on the "active desktop could not be restored" screen.

I have no Internet access. I've tried resetting the modem, etc but nothing seems to work. That makes trying to fix anything almost impossible. I'm typing this from my iPhone.

I get several stop codes but Google yields no results when searching them.

0x7564d3ba
0x77600741
0x75606eb5

I tried to do a system restore but the final click I need to make to start the restore does nothing. It's like I'm not even clicking it.

I looked around for anything out of the ordinary and found a couple things right away. In device manager, there is a yellow exclamation mark next to "Other Devices". When I expand that, there is another next to the only option, "SM Bus Controller".

I cannot open either of my hard drives. Clicking on my backup drive does nothing and clicking on my C drive gives another error:

Windows cannot find 'RECYCLER\S-1-0-29-100021450-100007094-8170.com'. Make sure you have typed the name correctly ........ (etc)

Any ideas? :cry:

sounds like you'll need to reformat to me...sucks though, and hope someone else has a better idea.

perhaps you could get a live linux disk, to see if you can boot into that...that would tell you if its software or hardware related.

Run system repair.

Could you be more specific?

I tried putting the xp disk in as I thought there was some some kind of repair option but there isn't. I have an old xp upgrade disk as well as a full version and neither gave me the option to do any sort of repair. From reading around a bit, I do not want to click new install, so.....

It's so tempermental I don't know if I can do anything at all on it.

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Originally Posted by Skizo

Could you be more specific?

I tried putting the xp disk in as I thought there was some some kind of repair option but there isn't. I have an old xp upgrade disk as well as a full version and neither gave me the option to do any sort of repair. From reading around a bit, I do not want to click new install, so.....

It's so tempermental I don't know if I can do anything at all on it.

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It depends on what version of windows you have. First I would run some hardware tests to make sure it's not a bad HD or memory.

Drive Fitness Test by Hitachi is a great little tool to run a HD test.

Memtest is a great memory test.

If both of those pass then I would try a windows repair as mentioned above. If it's possible it would be the 3rd screen in the windows installer. The first one you need to click enter to start, f8 to accept the agreement and then it would give you the option to repair an existing operating system.

If that option is not available then you would you need to a full restore.

Have you tired booting into safe mode and doing a windows restore?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Skizo

From reading around a bit, I do not want to click new install, so.....

It's so tempermental I don't know if I can do anything at all on it.

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Actually, clicking on new install is exactly what you want to do.
After that, it will find your hard drive(s) and the already installed OS and offer the option to repair or replace.
When you choose the repair option it will proceed exactly as though it's doing a full install but it's really only overwriting the core Windows files, leaving all your apps/data intact.

Have you checked the web for known issues with this particular utility you removed?

As odd as it sounds, I would try reinstalling it and see what happens, in case it fixes some system files that were removed during the uninstall

I removed an audio driver today and it caused my ethernet card to refuse to start up with a code 10 right after...I guess with Windows anything is possible

If you cannot rollback the O/S with a system restore (have you tried doing this via safe mode ?). Then a repair install is one of the few options left. It sounds to me though with missing hardware entries since the utilty removal that there has actually been a corruption of the registry? My first port of call would be to run a registry scan and repair tool to see if this resolves the issues. Something I use all the time is Hirens BootCD because it has all the hardware based utilities to do low level repairs on a single bootable CD including registry repair tools. Another option is to use Norton Systemworks and run it from the CD to run a registry repair (if you have either of these tools).

Once you have run a registry repair the system maybe stable enough to either continue using or to run a rollback on.

If these options do not work then a repair install is the next logical choice, remember though depending on your O/S disc you will have to reinstall the service packs afterwards.

I'd love to try some of things but I can't access the Internet to get any of them. Even if I could, I can't open my C drive to access anything.

I'm going through right now and testing the memory and GPUs one at a time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Skizo

I'd love to try some of things but I can't access the Internet to get any of them. Even if I could, I can't open my C drive to access anything.

I'm going through right now and testing the memory and GPUs one at a time.

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You do have friends I take it ? surely one of them must have one of those new fangled laptoppy thingee's or a PC with a burner. Hiren's BootCD is all over the interwebz and is roughly an 80mb download, this tool can pick up SATA controllers when booted itself, it also has the option to be run from within Windows so you can run diagnostics from within your Windows installation but they are still run from the CD they do not need to be installed.

I simply suggested using a tool like hirens to do some testing on your PC rather than going to the lengths of running a repair install since if it simply a corrupted registry, a registry repair may solve the problem.