Mad Geek
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
It's called a PEBCAK
So, on the side I build computer systems for people. Not an uncommon thing for a person in my line of work, I know. I have never had a system that I built fail . . . EVER. My wife actually says I spend too much time on making sure the system is rock solid stable before ever handing it off to the person and I should just move on to the next build. I'm not saying that a computer WILL never fail, just that it's unlikely to be right off the bat from something I forgot to do.
A friend of mine called me today saying that his father in law (who I built a system for) is upset with his computer. I've had complaints from this guy before and it's always the same error: "No system disc found." This is a genuine error and I immediately started down my checklist of worry spots:
Did I forget to set SATA as the boot device and it's looking for an IDE drive?
Did the partition table corrupt and is no longer recognized by Windows?
Was I a real moron and forget to include the SATA drivers from the motherboard maker in the first place?
Is the drive bad?
I went through my log of what I did and when I did it and I came to the answers no, no, no, and maybe. After driving across the valley (in my less than fuel efficient car) I show up to take a look at the system. As if in fear of me, it boots up with no problem. I run a few diagnostics and see the drive is operating just fine, within normal temperatures, the BIOS are set correctly, the drivers are fine, and Windows can see no problems (there's not even an entry in the error log). Just to be sure, I reboot the system 10 more times over the course of an hour.
That was a week ago and he says it's happening again. He wants a refund. So I had to tell him that he never actually bought the system from me, his daughter and my friend bought the hardware on their own and paid me to assemble it. But I'll happily refund the $25 I got from it to return my services by formatting the drive back to zeros and taking the system apart into it's base components . . . just like it was before my "meddling".
I have yet to hear back from him.
A friend of mine called me today saying that his father in law (who I built a system for) is upset with his computer. I've had complaints from this guy before and it's always the same error: "No system disc found." This is a genuine error and I immediately started down my checklist of worry spots:
Did I forget to set SATA as the boot device and it's looking for an IDE drive?
Did the partition table corrupt and is no longer recognized by Windows?
Was I a real moron and forget to include the SATA drivers from the motherboard maker in the first place?
Is the drive bad?
I went through my log of what I did and when I did it and I came to the answers no, no, no, and maybe. After driving across the valley (in my less than fuel efficient car) I show up to take a look at the system. As if in fear of me, it boots up with no problem. I run a few diagnostics and see the drive is operating just fine, within normal temperatures, the BIOS are set correctly, the drivers are fine, and Windows can see no problems (there's not even an entry in the error log). Just to be sure, I reboot the system 10 more times over the course of an hour.
That was a week ago and he says it's happening again. He wants a refund. So I had to tell him that he never actually bought the system from me, his daughter and my friend bought the hardware on their own and paid me to assemble it. But I'll happily refund the $25 I got from it to return my services by formatting the drive back to zeros and taking the system apart into it's base components . . . just like it was before my "meddling".
I have yet to hear back from him.
:: posted by Zuke, 11:43 AM
