Potential solution found...
Feb. 6th, 2013 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpUpon completing the decryption, my system rebooted and pretty much went through a normal startup.
So what had changed?
Well, in preparation to run the starup repair routine from the Windows 7 DVD, I had removed the SD card that more or less permanently resides in the machine's slot for such cards, and it was only after a successful reboot after decryption was completed—which makes me wonder, why didn't the machine boot from the DVD?—that I recalled an episode from a while back in which my machine displayed a BSOD upon bootup, complaining about Something Bad™ having happened upon trying to use the driver that mounts SD cards, whereupon I shut the machine down, removed the card, used the eraser of a No. 2 pencil lightly on the conductive pads (a technique I picked up as a radio operator in the Marines, which has the effect of removing any crud that may have accumulated), reinserted the card, and tried starting up again, with success.
So I suspect that what happened today was not so serious as to require a BSOD, but serious enough to cause the system to terminate its startup routine. Right now, the SD card (with pads freshly "erased") is back in the machine, which is booting as I tap this entry.
(I just looked in on the process, which appears to have completed without mishap.)
I should probably erase the pads every two or three weeks as a precautionary measure, to avoid such events in the future.
* * * The other night, Galina and I were feeling the munchies while driving home along 146 in Seabrook, when we spied a Pizza Hut and decided we would make it a "pizza night." My past experience with Pizza Hut, however, caused me to fire up Siri on my iPhone to see if there was any alternative pizza joints in the area. It turned out there was a Domino's between where we were and home, so I called in an order and we drove over, which took less than five minutes.
The "anchor" establishment in the same mini-strip mall is a bar called the "Cock & Bull," a name that never fails to remind me of my mother and of the way she would dismiss the, uh, occasional, er, prevarication that I offered at times during my adolescence ("That sounds like a 'cock and bull' story to me, young man!"). Anyway, there was still quite a bit of time to wait until the pizza would be ready, so we visited the bar, which calls itself "an English-style pub."
Having never really gotten a good feel for the structure and routine of an English pub—this would require, ahem, more research (much more)—I cannot comment on how "English" the place it. I can tell you about the closest thing on tap to what you'd find on the other side of The Pond was Guinness. When I ordered one, the bartended "upsold" me on something called "Laughing Dog Imperial Stout" (aka "The Dogfather"), which was a bourbon-aged product from a brewery in Ponderay, Idaho.
It was quite good, but it was so satisfying, I had no desire for another one, which was okay, as I find it awkward for one beer to cost almost as much as the large pizza one is planning to take home and eat.
* * * Something I saw at an estate sale a week or two ago finally dislodged a memory of my own. It was a box of electronic tubes, ruinously overpriced, but which got me to thinking that perhaps there might be some ham equipment in the rubble (there wasn't).
Today, by some circuitous route, I recalled how my stepdad would, on occasion, go through the ritual of moving our television away from the wall, removing its back cover, and removing a candidate "faulty tube" from somewhere in the guts of the box (selected with the aid of a book that contained images of malfunctioning screens that were keyed to specific tubes). Then he and I would go down to a shop—I forget what it was, but it wasn't a television repair shop, as I recall—where he would insert the tube in a socket of a test device festooned with several dozen such sockets of various size, press a test button, and after a few seconds find out if the tube was good or bad. Using the tester was almost like playing a slot machine, where a "jackpot" consisted of finding that the right tube (or one of perhaps several malfunctioning tubes) had been taken out for testing.
This kind of thing occurred every year or two, and I recall that my stepdad generally 'hit the jackpot' more often than not in such encounters. Visits by professional repair techs were rare in our house.
Cheers...
So what had changed?
Well, in preparation to run the starup repair routine from the Windows 7 DVD, I had removed the SD card that more or less permanently resides in the machine's slot for such cards, and it was only after a successful reboot after decryption was completed—which makes me wonder, why didn't the machine boot from the DVD?—that I recalled an episode from a while back in which my machine displayed a BSOD upon bootup, complaining about Something Bad™ having happened upon trying to use the driver that mounts SD cards, whereupon I shut the machine down, removed the card, used the eraser of a No. 2 pencil lightly on the conductive pads (a technique I picked up as a radio operator in the Marines, which has the effect of removing any crud that may have accumulated), reinserted the card, and tried starting up again, with success.
So I suspect that what happened today was not so serious as to require a BSOD, but serious enough to cause the system to terminate its startup routine. Right now, the SD card (with pads freshly "erased") is back in the machine, which is booting as I tap this entry.
(I just looked in on the process, which appears to have completed without mishap.)
I should probably erase the pads every two or three weeks as a precautionary measure, to avoid such events in the future.
The "anchor" establishment in the same mini-strip mall is a bar called the "Cock & Bull," a name that never fails to remind me of my mother and of the way she would dismiss the, uh, occasional, er, prevarication that I offered at times during my adolescence ("That sounds like a 'cock and bull' story to me, young man!"). Anyway, there was still quite a bit of time to wait until the pizza would be ready, so we visited the bar, which calls itself "an English-style pub."
Having never really gotten a good feel for the structure and routine of an English pub—this would require, ahem, more research (much more)—I cannot comment on how "English" the place it. I can tell you about the closest thing on tap to what you'd find on the other side of The Pond was Guinness. When I ordered one, the bartended "upsold" me on something called "Laughing Dog Imperial Stout" (aka "The Dogfather"), which was a bourbon-aged product from a brewery in Ponderay, Idaho.
It was quite good, but it was so satisfying, I had no desire for another one, which was okay, as I find it awkward for one beer to cost almost as much as the large pizza one is planning to take home and eat.
Today, by some circuitous route, I recalled how my stepdad would, on occasion, go through the ritual of moving our television away from the wall, removing its back cover, and removing a candidate "faulty tube" from somewhere in the guts of the box (selected with the aid of a book that contained images of malfunctioning screens that were keyed to specific tubes). Then he and I would go down to a shop—I forget what it was, but it wasn't a television repair shop, as I recall—where he would insert the tube in a socket of a test device festooned with several dozen such sockets of various size, press a test button, and after a few seconds find out if the tube was good or bad. Using the tester was almost like playing a slot machine, where a "jackpot" consisted of finding that the right tube (or one of perhaps several malfunctioning tubes) had been taken out for testing.
This kind of thing occurred every year or two, and I recall that my stepdad generally 'hit the jackpot' more often than not in such encounters. Visits by professional repair techs were rare in our house.
Cheers...
