Monthly Archives: July 2007

frozen hard drive allows recovery

Computer Aid Posted on by

A wd2000 sata hdd would only start when “cold”.

I took it to the office, and after a few tests, it became obvious that the drive wasn’t going to last much longer.

I decided to put it in the freezer (made sure it was sealed in a plastic bag, to prevent condensation on the electronics when I took it out.

I’ve tried the freezer trick many times, but this is the first time its actually worked.

It works for between 2 – 8 minutes, then I hear a clunk, and the drive disappears from XP.

I had to re-freeze it about 15 times, before I could recover about 120Gb of data.

After the 5th re-freeze, I got sick of waiting for my PC to startup while the frozen HDD was thawing, so I decided to plug in the drive while the PC was running (sata cable first, then the power cable. Hey! it worked!

This gave me an extra 2 minutes of copy time for each re-freeze.

I then started to wonder if I could “hot plug” an IDE HDD while a PC is running?

Well, I tried it, but it didn’t work. Looks like SATA drives are nicer to work with when recovering data.

faulty keyboard

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer called saying she is having problems with her email.

She is elderly. and uses dial-up.

She say when she tries to compose an email, she just gets a line across the screen.

Its difficult to get any further technical details, so I decide to visit.

When I get there, I notice the keyboard is doing strange things… the various keyboard shortcuts that I use don’t seem to work (the windows key in particular).

When I open up outlook express, the to: field starts filling up with the – character.

Ah, it looks like a stuck key. A tap of the keypad minus key stops the constant repeating, but the keyboard still refuses to work.

At this point, its just not worth mucking around. I take another keyboard out of the car, and replace the faulty one.

It works like a charm.

This application has failed to start because umpnpmgr.dll was not found

Computer Aid Posted on by

My P3 evectra pc suddenly wouldn’t start. The mouse pointer still worked, but after the error (this application has failed to start because umpnpmgr.dll was not found), it just shows a blank black screen and there is no disk activity.

Ctrl-alt-del doesn’t do anything, so there is nothing else left to do, except switch off the power.

I try safe mode but I get exactly the same results.

By using a live CD (bart PE), I find the file in cwindowssystem32 and dllcache, but its dated aug 2005… (exactly the same as on another working system)

I use a usb drive to copy umpnpmgr.dll to the damaged system, but I get a crc error.

I try a few different ways (including just deleting the dll), but it seems untouchable… its looking like the maxtor 541DX drive is faulty.

I use a different drive (I ghost copy from another identical, working system), and it all works well.

Hardware failures can cause so many different symptoms… it always amazes (and frustrates) me.

ie7 uses 100% cpu (add-ons problem)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I had a customer who installed ie7, and then it stopped working… emails worked fine, but no browsing (and the CPU hits 100% until I end the IE task).

I take a look, and sure enough, ie7 only gives the page cannot be found error.

I try cleaning the IE cache, ipconfig /flushdns, but the problem is still there.

I uninstall ie7, and ie6 works fine.

I reinstall ie7, and then it stops working again.

Hmmm, it should just work.

There were a few toolbars (yahoo, google, etc), so I try running IE7 with no add-ons (look under: accessories -> system tools.

Hey, it works…

So from ie7, I go to tools -> manage add-ons -> enable or disable add-ons

I then disable all the useless-looking add-ons (all the yahoo, google and msn toolbars), and after that it works every time.

However, I found I had to disable the add-ons for all the users on the system (a total of 3). It was annoying enough, that I started wondering if there was a way to globally disable add-on across all users. I’ll have to look it up (one day…)