Gordo

I was messing around with some WMA to MP3 converters yesterday (have a load of WMA music with DRM on that I no longer want to just play in the evil windows media player - but there's too much to convert with hard disks).

One left a virtual cd rw drive on the machine (I think it was DVDneXtCopy iTurns) which then led to the machine refusing to boot, even though I'd uninstalled the software.

Had blue screen lots of times (hardware malfunction, NMIarity check / memory parity error) but am very confident it's not hardware: I've tried with both RAM sticks on their own (1Gb each) - surprisingly it booted on 'last settings that worked' when I put them both back in, but then it hasn't booted since after I turned it off. Have also run memcheck (using a memcheck disk) and it gave a clean bill of health. Has booted a couple of times but not obvious why and haven't been able to replicate it.

The virtual drive seemed to not be there when it did last boot but it's still falling "error allocating mem bar (and I/O bar) for PCI device" on start. Have re-mounted the only PCI device on it (graphics card) which works fine.

Any ideas other than a complete re-install (which I don't want to do as am bound to lose something - other half's emails mainly ).

Thanks in advance.

Gordo

JackClark

I'd boot another operating system, probably Ubuntu Live CD, that'll run up without touching your hard drive and let you know if it's hardware or what's on your drive.

You can download the ubuntu image here Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu
Burn that to a CD and boot to it

Probably not very useful but could help

Gordo

Thanks Jack - booted fine with Ubuntu (actually looks quite good!) - so must be something on the hard drive, related to the multi-drive issue. Now at a bit of a loss I must admit.....back to Google

JackClark

If nothing else you now have an easy method of getting the other halves emails.

Gordo

thanks - all sorted - managed to spot the remnants of a virtual scsi drive - uninstalled it and all is well again!