I was happily checking out thevistaforums.com, this morning, when all of the sudden my desktop computer decided to "blue screen" on me right then and there.
Thinking to myself that this "blue screen of death" (or BSOD as we techies like to call them) was nothing more than a fluke of some sort, I patiently waited for my computer to restart and come back up.
Upon watching the POST, I saw nothing but pain on the screen; nothing but a nasty error message that is. I was greeted to a dreadful error which could mean nothing more than my Windows Vista install being hosed.
"Not to worry!" I thought to myself, as I reached for my Acronis 10 Emergency Boot CD. Upon popping the disc into the DVD tray, and waiting for yet another reboot, I was then greeted to my computer rebooting as it loaded the Acronis environment. Bottom line: Acronis refused to boot.
"Oh sh*t!" I thought to myself.
"Well, Acronis won't work, what gives?" Is the thought that followed my initial "oh shit!" comment. I even tried the Acronis CD several more times to no success. Heck, I even unplugged devices and tried the Acronis CD again. Still nothing.
At this point, it was looking like I'd have to do a complete system reformat and reinstall of Windows Vista.
"This is so not good!" I said to myself. "Why does this have to happen on a freaking Sunday morning?" I questioned my computer, thinking it would answer me somehow.
I inserted my Windows Vista DVD to begin a repair install, and rebooted once more. Upon the DVD booting, I was greeted to even still another tragic error. No dice.
"WTF?" I angrily thought. At this point, you can be rest assured that I was pretty pissed off.
Thinking there's more going on here than meets the eye, I began the troubleshooting process which turned out to be a very long, lengthy process.
I swapped out the Windows Vista install DVD for Windows XP Professional, thinking it's something with Windows Vista. Still nothing. This time, whenever the Windows XP Professional set up wizard would get to the first stage of partitioning the hard drive, it would crap out on me with an NTFS timing error as soon as it detected the hard drive. Weird.
I swapped out the hard drive, thinking the drive was going bad (even though it was only several weeks old), and tried Windows Vista again. Nothing but a nice big error message.
I swapped out the Windows Vista install DVD for Windows XP Professional again. Still nothing. Same error, NTFS timing shit again.
As you could pretty much imagine, I was ready to throw this entire machine out into the yard and attack it with the chain saw. But then, I had a thought.
Being this machine would not boot successfully with both Windows Vista, or Windows XP Professional, even when using different hard drives, I knew there had to be a logical solution; mainly this had to be a hardware issue. Calming myself down, I thought it out.
"Let's pop in my memory test boot CD and see what happens." I said aloud.
Sure enough, as soon as the memory test CD loaded and began to run automatically; thousands of memory errors began scrolling down the screen.
"Well I'll be damned!" I thought.
I powered off my machine, and pulled out all of the RAM modules and plugged one and only one back in, and restarted my computer with the memory test CD in the drive. The first module worked perfectly.
Powering off again, I plugged in another RAM module for a total of two modules installed, restarted, and "bingo!" the memory errors returned. I set aside the faulty RAM module and moved on to the next two RAM modules and repeated the process two more times. The next two memory modules tested out fine.
Needless to say, I was able to get my machine back up and running without a hitch. I am now operating on 2 Gb of RAM (shiver) as I will place a warranty RMA request with the manufacturer of my faulty RAM module.
The moral of the story here? When funky little problems creep up like what I had this morning, test the RAM first. You'll save a couple hours worth of troubleshooting real quick, not to mention several handfuls of hair.