Monday, April 21, 2003		Feature

Let’s go troubleshooting
Jasjot Singh Narula

COMPUTER, undoubtedly, is a wonderful invention, that has made the day-to-day task easy, yet these wonderful machines can also become incredibly infuriating at times. This implies that your PC is in for trouble and are you.

Troubles come uninvited. Some may be big and may require an expert’s intervention while others may just require you to be a wee bit PC-troubleshooting savvy. If you can adopt the do-it-yourself concept, well then, hats off. You already are a troubleshooter.

Troubleshooting means eradicating problems within a PC that may arise during the installation of software or hardware. Merely assembling 12 components doesn’t make a PC. Installing a competent operating system makes it one. During installation, there are a number of steps to follow and one of them is making a bootable or a startup disk.

Bootable or startup disk

The easiest way to make a bootable disk is through Windows ’95/’98/ME. Go to Control Panel/ Click Add/Remove Program and then click Startup Disk. Here the user has to take the help of floppy for booting purpose. When the boot diskette is ready, restart the system. Once the system is restarted press Delete on the keyboard to enter the CMOS setup or BIOS setup. Here the user can change the boot sequence of the drive. Usually the boot sequence is arranged as 1^st boot device floppy drive, 2^nd boot device hard disk drive and 3^rd boot device CD ROM. Now save the settings and exit from the BIOS setup. When PC restarts, it will detect floppy drive at first and later, the other devices. The computer will now boot up with start-up floppy.

The start-up disk contains important files to start the PC, like Autoexec.bat, Config.sys, Command.com etc. that initiate the system. There are a number of tasks that bootable disk can perform:

1. It can create a master boot record for hard disk through ‘Fdisk’ command and can create partitions according to the needs.

2. For first time installation of operating system Start-up diskette is quite useful.

3. The diskette can be used when system is infected with boot sector virus.

4. User can check the status of hard disk through scandisk command for bad sectors, if it is installed for the first time.

5. Format command can be used through bootable diskette and for quick format (use command C:\ >format c:\ q). Be cautious while formatting the hard disk because user may lose all data available on the hard disk.

6. Through this, the user may access CD ROM and install operating system on it i.e. Windows 95/98/ME.

Getting Microsoft Windows ’95/98/ME startup menu

This menu is the key function for starting up Windows in different modes. The menu can be made available by pressing F8 while the system boots up. Different functions will then appear. They are:

1. Normal

2. Logged (Bootlog.txt)

3. Safemode

4. Step-by-step confirmation

5. Command prompt only

6. Safe mode command prompt only

Safe Mode environment

When the user is in Safe Mode, Windows skip the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files and load minimum set of drivers that lets the PC function at a basic level. Usually the user can’t print or use modem but apart from that user can do lots of things to make the system run properly. The idea of Safe Mode, however, is to let the user do things like install driver updates or make software changes.

Step-by-step confirmation

Another common startup troubleshooting technique is to take advantage of the Step-by-step confirmation mode. Windows asks a number of questions before it loads certain programs called for in the startup files. The idea is that by loading files one at a time, user can judge what’s causing the problem more quickly.

There are a numbers of problems which user may find while at Startup level.

Problem: PC doesn’t detect the hard disk drive and floppy disk drive.

Solution: Firstly check whether the data cables are properly connected on the hard drive and floppy drive. If yes, then check into the CMOS/BIOS settings. Go to Standard CMOS feature and detect the HDD drive. For floppy drive, the user has to provide drive specification. Once it is installed, save the settings and exit from CMOS.

Problem: An error that comes most commonly while system boots up is CMOS checksum error press F1 to continue.

Solution: Here the CMOS battery is weak and if the user changes the battery, then there will be no error in future.

Problem: While installing Windows, the system hangs up and shows registry errors

Solution: This may be a serious issue because either the RAM is not properly inserted into the slot or there is a problem with the RAM. Change the RAM for betterment of PC.

Problem: During the Windows ’95/98 boot, user gets an "Invalid System Disk" error

Solution: This may occur because of non-bootable floppy in drive. Remove the disk and press any key. There might be other reasons also. Your system may be infected with boot-sector virus. This can be removed by using any anti-virus software.