Well!

I didn't think I would be back so soon. The circus continues.

It is a DAMN GOOD THING that my BattleBot is in the same room with me. It gave me something to take my aggression out on. I have a big square steel pipe laying on top of it, which was very convenient, because I was able to grab it and just start whacking away at the BattleBot. It worked out well, because there was no way I could possibly hurt the stupid thing. Which is also good, because the BattleBot wasn't the problem.

I was just sitting here, minding my own business, working on my old laptop computer (the one with no lid/screen), when all of a sudden, my main desktop computer starts emitting a 1KHz tone from the speaker. You know, like the old computers always did. Only this was just one long continuous tone that would not stop. At first, I thought it was the embedded computer, because it makes that tone when it boots...but only for a moment.

But that wasn't it.

Then I thought it was my laptop computer, because it is running in DOS mode, and I would expect it to make that sound...and I just ran some code that I just finished modifying.

But that wasn't it.

So I switched the monitor over to Borg, my desktop computer, and what did I see? THE PROBLEM! There was a blue screen of death, telling me there was a KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR and how I should go into Safe Mode (like I would know what to do there) if the problem persisted (like I really knew what the problem was in the first place). It happened shortly after I heard the main system drive power down (after its 60-minute power-saving time-out expired). I also happened to notice that the KLUNK that the drive made when it powered off did not sound at all normal.

The rest of the BSOD indicated the problem occurred in atapi.sys (AHA! It was drive-related!) at F81E88EE base address at F81DA000 datestamp 3D6DDB04 (like that means ANYTHING to ANYONE) and that a memory dump was in progress.

Well, excuse me, but how do you record a memory dump if you can't access the drive?

This didn't make sense, and the noise was rather irritating, so I hit reset button. Well, of course, the system wouldn't restart. It was acting like the system drive did not exist. The IDE scan in the BIOS POST couldn't find it.

So that's when I started beating up my BattleBot.

Once I got the impulse to bat my computer through the window out of my biological system, I went back to see if I could resurrect my computer system.

AGAIN.

After powering it off and leaving it off for a couple minutes, I turned it back on and it booted. Well, it came to the desktop, anyway. Beyond that, it was hopeless. It wouldn't respond to anything. When I FINALLY got the Task Manager up, I could see that the CPU was running at 100%. I EVENTUALLY determined that it was Explorer that was eating up the CPU time. I finally managed to get it to reboot again, and now it seems to be back. For now, anyway.

If it wasn't back, I wouldn't be typing this right now.

The only thing I can think that happened was that the wonderful, glorious Windows operating system attempted to access the drive at the very same moment that the wonderful, glorious Windows operating system cut the power to the drive. A mental note to Microsoft: YOU CAN'T DO BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!

The atapi driver stuck its tongue out and said, "THTHTHTHTHTHTHTH!" And that was the end of that.

So now I have the wonderful, glorious Windows operating system configured so that it never turns off the power to the hard drives (unless I shut down the whole computer). I never liked them going on and off, anyway, as I knew that was only asking for trouble. If there is anything I have learned from this, it is to ALWAYS act on my instincts sooner. I have been meaning to change that setting for some time now.

Now it's permanent.