I use son’s old PC(AMD 900 circa 2000) as a test box. It is set up to dual boot W2K server and Fedora 4. Over the Christmas holidays both systems crashed on me and I assumed I had a hardware failure. Since I had recently fixed my son’s new PC and my mind was in a PC troubleshooting mode, I decided to give the old PC some attention. The W2K side was showing a BSOD with a registry file failure. Switching to the last known good configuration did not help. The Fedora side would not run Firefox. Nothing happened. Now I could not logon to my mere mortal account. The message it showed said “gdm could not write authorization file”.
My first guess was that something was wrong with the disk drives. It was odd that both disk drives would show errors if that truly was the source of failure. So I decided to run Ubuntu Live and test the other components. This was easy. Just put the CD-ROM in the drive and boot. Everything came up fine and Firefox ran perfectly. So then I ran a search on the gdm message. The replies indicated most people thought this was a disk full indicator. Hmmm….I know I was playing around with downloading ISO’s using Fedora. So I booted into Fedora and deleted the ISO’s using the administrative account. Yea, I remembered to empty the trash. Fedora works fine.
Fixing the W2K registry problem was more complex. I went into the Recovery Console and restored the initial registry created during the installation. I rebooted and started the update process(e.g. applying the service pack and patches). Somewhere after applying the service pack and before switching over to Microsoft Update, the system took a trip to Neverland. Microsoft Update got caught in a loop trying to update components. Windows Update sent me to Microsoft Update. My “Add or Remove Programs” panel would not come up. It was time to go Plan B.
So I went back and repaired the system files using the Server CD-ROM. Then I let Windows Update lead me through the process of updating the system, IE 6 rollup and then Service Pack 4. Microsoft Update kicked in after the Service Pack update and tried to install Installer 3.1. For some reason Installer 3.1 would not install via Microsoft Update so I installed it manually. It appears to be running fine and my reason to buy a new PC has diminished again. Darn!