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When Windows Fails Don Bradbury runs through a system failure scenario - they happen even to the experts! A Windows 95 PC in the family was switched on for the first time in months the other day. Windows failed to run, the machine ‘thinking about it’ for a time before finally dropping out the user to a curt “System failure; abort, retry, fail” message. What to do!? Well, if your computer ever does that to you, and you have data on the machine that you’d like to recover if possible, the first thing to bear in mind is…DON’T PANIC! First, let the machine warm up for a while, perhaps an hour; just leave it running. Hard disk read failures - a likely cause in this case - are sometimes due to read head alignment going out of true relative to the disk tracks. Warming it up just might bring it back into line, sufficient for you to gain access and recover your work files. Absent Startup Disk No Windows 95 Startup floppy could be located for this ancient system, so some other way of booting from the floppy drive had to be found. I first used a memory testing program bootable floppy I happened to have to hand. It didn’t have MSDOS on it, but that didn’t matter. I just wanted to know if the PC would boot at all. It did! And it let me log on to the C: drive, too, and get a DIR listing of the root directory files. Things were looking a little brighter. If I’d have had a Windows Startup floppy to hand, I’d have tried a SYS C: command at this point to restore the possibly corrupted system files from the floppy to the hard drive. In its absence, I simply let Windows have two or three fresh looks at the hard drive, invoking restarts with Ctrl/Alt/Del. Corrupt Registry Finally, the PC decided it couldn’t read the Windows Registry files and suggested I restore a previous copy immediately by clicking on a tab or I was “likely to lose data”. Unfortunately, that option wasn’t available as the system had locked up, simultaneously claiming that Windows Explorer had failed and would be closed down. Yet another Ctrl/Alt/Del, and this time the machine went into deep thought, with lots of re-looks at the hard drive (as you can detect by looking at the brief flashes of the disk drive activation light, a sure sign of disk reading trouble). But an attempt to produce the Windows Desktop - corrupted and incomplete but recognizable - lent further hope of rescuing the machine to at least some level of accessibility. I toyed with the idea of simply reinstalling Windows 95 ‘over the top’, that is, without a format of the disk first, but that meant an hour of thumb twiddling that I didn’t fancy unless it was absolutely necessary. After booting to the corrupt Windows Desktop, I located Scandisk and tried a Standard test with that. After a while, that gave up and suggested a ‘Thorough’ test, to which I readily agreed. It meant that some Folders had been found in a usable state but others were not.
But in the end, a fairly full Windows Desktop reappeared, though with no Taskbar or Quick Launch toolbar items present, and no Start Menu items at all beyond an empty Start folder. I set about restoring some key applications and system facilities to the Start Menu using the Add facility in the Advanced section of Start/Setting/Taskbar/Start Menu Programs, using Browse to locate the executables. OK, that wasn’t going to get me to the end of my journey as the hard drive was clearly beyond hope and would have to be replaced, but with the Windows system at last running reasonably I could recover any data files that were needed by the owner before deciding what to do next.
The moral of this little story is; wait, be patient, try a few things before slinging the thing through the window, don’t give up, just have a think about it. Finally, let Windows have a think about it, too, by rebooting, several times if necessary. Each one of these attributes will be familiar to all true Windows aficionados, whichever flavour of the operating system they use! Windows from version 95 on, while not the most stable you could imagine, was pretty smart at repairing itself and its host environment when given the chance. Next time we’ll look at some of Windows’ arcane error messages and what you should do about it when you encounter one.
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‘Thorough’
Scandisk reported a few bad disk sectors (not surprising) and I let
it ‘mark’ them as bad. Although there was high prospect of
irrecoverable system files, or worse, data, in these, there was
little option. I could always reinstall ‘over the top’ if necessary
to restore the Windows system. One or two missing Windows files were
suggested as likely during this operation, and these were actually
named in case I fancied trying to copy them over from a suitable
source.
