Sanity Check

[SavannahLion]

I'm kind of exhausted so I need a Sanity Check.

I've got a kids laptop on my bench, an Acer Aspire One D250-1389 running some version of XP. It's an Intel Atom N270@1.6GHz with 2G of RAM and a 160GB Hitachi HDD (ugh).

Damn thing goes into an infinite boot cycle no matter what boot mode I try to get it into.

There's a BSOD that flashes by so quickly, I can't even read it so I took out my phone and filmed the boot process hoping my camera would catch it. Yep, it sure does look bad. This is a crop of the shot



Ugh....
According to MS KB 555302 the solution isn't going to work. There is no disc drive (I have an external drive), I have no idea where my spare XP disc is, which is all mott as MS isn't supporting XP anymore anyways.

I have a very strong suspicion that the computer has an unwanted visitor that hosed the MBR. The history on this has very strong pointers in that direction. Another possibility is the Hitachi drive took a dump. It's certainly not the first Hitachi drive to crap out on me. But I don't see or hear the usual signs the Hitachi drive failed. I could use a LiveBoot disc to poke around on the disc to see what I can salvage but I don't see much point in that. Maybe a few photos or some school papers. For this, experience tells me I'm not going to find much if anything at all.

All the kid really wants to do is play Minecraft on it and edit videos.

So I see a couple of options here. Install TinyXP but risk the same ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow--- six months down the road or install Ubuntu and use the Linux version of Minecraft and hope he can play with his friends online. I'm clueless about what Linux video editing software is available out there.

Or is Ubuntu even a good choice? The kid is 12 so I think so. Ubuntu is also a good solid OS as it hasn't gone anywhere in the past ten years. Not like Puppy or Yellow or the myriad of other crap branches out there.

Is this a good idea or does someone have a better suggestion?

[ed12]

that error point's to the ram..any 0x0000xx is ram bound
but beyound that i would go with linux any day of the week over winblow's

ed

[JDFan]

Another option would be to download an iso rather than TinyXP - just make sure the SHA-1 or MD5 matches the original and it should be untampered with. (there is a list of MD5/SHA1's of windows Oses HERE ( http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2041377 ) that you can use to verify the iso you are downloading is an unaltered original iso. And since you mention TinyXP downloading I assume you know enough to find an XP iso download.

[spoot]

memtest86+
whatever drive manufacturer disk test tool

Go from there.

[SavannahLion]

oohh.... I didn't know about those checksums. That's really useful.

I forgot about memtest86 and I've got probably a dozen versions lying around. Just ran the the one off of the Ubuntu disc and the first go around has all passes. I'll give it a few more goarounds to heat the board up a bit and see if anything manifests itself.

I'm pretty impressed with this version of Ubuntu getting so much of the hardware right on the first go around. Fiddled with it and was really surprised to see the Wifi configured. Never had a Linux install get that right before.

[lilshawn]

had one of these...they are not great, but i dunno about editing videos....but anyways...


the drive has a recovery partition on the drive. assuming the HD hasn't gone totally kaput, if i remember correctly you load it by holding ALT+F10 right after you power it on.

[SavannahLion]

I thought as much. I just remembered about fdisk to look at the partitions but the drive seems smaller than 160GB.

I've been heeing and hawing whether I should just flat out remove XP and go with Ubuntu.

The biggest problem I face is lack of support from MS for XP and the anemic CPU to be running a virus scanner and firewall on this.

Not saying I don't want to use OS condoms but turning a low end CPU into the equivalent of a fat ugly ---smurfette--- isn't my idea of a good time.

[lilshawn]

yes, the more streamlined you can make it the better. it's processor is pretty paltry. Jacking the ram to 1.5gb (the max it can handle) is a good thing to do too if it hasn't been already.

if you feel up to it, make a tiny XP USB drive and install that on there... the less the better for these things. you want as streamlined OS as you can get.

If you do reload the XP from the rescue partition, ---meecrob--- out all the acer software...there is no need for it. it'll free up lots of space and RAM.