Bill’s Blog

Christmas cottage from Michael’s with some trees off of a Winnie the Pooh birthday cake.  All three of us helped build this.  We had a lot of fun, though it managed to try our patience at times.

Emily and I were planning our day this morning and we decided to set up the lights and take some pictures.  We took turns taking pictures of her stuffed animals.  Finally, Karen decided to join us and we took a family portrait.  Well, sort of…

We had some company at our house recently.  Theresa and her friend Julie came out for a few days.  We took them to one of our favorite spots, McMenamin’s Grand Lodge.  Here’s Theresa sitting in one of the more fashionable rooms there.

This past weekend we all piled into the car minivan and went to spend some time with the relatives.  It was hot out, so the kids played in the water.  We all had a good time visiting and catching up.  See all the pics here.

I’ve had my Dell Dimension 4600 for over four years now.  It’s been a great PC.  I used it as my main machine until a few months ago when I upgraded to a new Core 2 Duo machine I built myself.  I decided to give my old PC to my father in law.

Aparantly I gave it to him just in time.  After he took it home he kept telling me it wouldn’t boot.  I was thinking that maybe something had come loose or that he didn’t have something hooked up correctly.  Anyway, he finally got tired of waiting for me to come over and look at it and dropped it off any my house.  I fired it up this weekend and found the problem.  Sure enough, it wouldn’t boot.  It couldn’t find the file HALL.DLL.  That seems like a pretty important file (it’s the hardware abstraction layer – without it Windows doesn’t work at all).

Step 1: Try to “replace” the file.  I booted the machine using an Ubuntu Live CD and tried to copy the HALL.DLL file from another PC.  This didn’t work.  Ubuntu could access the drive, but not the system32 directory where HALL.DLL lives.

Step 2: Move hard drive to another PC.  I thought I might have better luck if I put the old hard drive into my new PC as a secondary drive.  Once I did this it was obvious that something was amiss.  CHKDSK revealed a bazillion bad sectors and other nasty things wrong with the drive.

Step 3: Format and reinstall.  With Windows, it always comes down to this doesn’t it.  I formatted the drive, reinstalled XP from my Dell backup disks, downloaded 537 patches and updates, installed some apps, and quit about 17 hours later.

The PC is now working.  The only thing that bothers me is how it broke in the first place.  I guess there are some things I am not meant to know.