What did I do now?

October 17, 2007 2:38 PM

I could use some help diagnosing a system crash, stabilizing my machine and determining how freaked out I should be.

My computer did a weird thing this morning, and my usual tech support resource (Google) isn't turning up much to help me diagnosis it. I hate to once more drag AskMe into the long squabble between my computer and I, but here goes ..

AVG 2.0 ghz
ASUS ABN-E series motherboard (socket 939)
Windows XP, service pack 2

When I turned it on this morning, it hung up on the BIOS at the ACPI Controller, at IRQ 9. Resetting it was no help. After a couple tries, I opened my optical drive to find a blank CD i'd forgotten about. With this, windows promptly booted.

When it got to the desktop, a "Windows has just recovered from a serious error" message waiting for me.

It had this code -
BCCode: 100000050 BCPI: E3E5B660 BCP2: 00000000 BCP3: BFA1CBB6 BCP4: 00000001

And wanted to tell Microsoft about two files in folder called "temp" in the local settings directory of My Documents

\LOCALS\tEMP\WERF0C0DIRE00\Mini101307-01. and
\LOCALS\tEMP\WERF0C0DIRE00\sysdata.xml

Event viewer had noticed the booting error, and gave it ID 1003 and Category: (102) The string above was repeated in event viewer.

It also had an error from when I shut down the night before - System restore had encountered an unexpected error when reading a compressed file on my desktop, and "would no longer monitor the volume" - Event ID 1, category none

I'm wondering if I'd forgotten to change back off of "boot from disk" since the last time i had to do so, and this whole mess is just on account of that blank disk. But I swear I've started up with non-windows disks in the drive w/o such calamity. I'm tempted to restart and see if it goes normal this time, or to run Scandisk, but rebooting went so badly last time ...

So I'm hoping a Mefite much smarter than I could be of help in diagnosing all this scariness. Indeed, in helping me determine if this is all that scary at all. Windows seems pretty concerned, but I never know how to gauge Xp's reactions.

Thank you so much.

posted by EatTheWeek to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Generally, when booting from a cd-drive, without a bootable disk, the BIOS should fail you over to trying to boot from HD. The gotcha to this is that many so called "non-bootable" disks actually are, but they're only booting into an app that says "non-system disk, hit return to reset".
posted by nomisxid at 3:34 PM on October 17, 2007

Okay. I doubted the explanation would have been so simple .. I'm really puzzled by the immediate clearing of the hang-up by opening the optical drive ..
posted by EatTheWeek at 3:53 PM on October 17, 2007

run a chkdsk on the hard drive and scan for malware using your malware scanner of choice. spybot search and destroy and sophos anti-rootkit i use.
posted by browolf at 3:28 AM on October 28, 2007