PhillyGeek

Thats a good question I would say go with the IDE drivers when installing. And get everything to work right. Install the sata drivers, and hopefully that creates the registry locations so you can appoly the registry fix. But the keys might not get created till you reboot with the new drivers which you cannot do. If they don't get created till you reboot, you can try to restart and if it fails try to restart in safemode, assumeing that works. Then add the registry keys then. They are simple enough to add by hand actually. One of the reasons I was willing to apply it to a production machine, the keys simply need to deleted to reverse the process.

After I posted this yesterday I did more research and found the following link. Nvidia FAQ This tells about how to fix it. In my case I can get into windows no trouble, but if you try to do anything with alot of pageing then the application will crash. On previous BIOS versions the machine would just shut off. I will be running this fix in a bit to see if that helps/works. Let me know if you find anything else out.

Well today is your lucky day!!! Ok well not really.... This is a known issue according to our hardware supplier and they are working on a resolution. Reccomendation is to just use the IDE drivers till a fix is released. Depending on the nVidia chipset and the SATA drive in question the troubles vary. We have had one set of machines just turn off, but the newest just log errors and the programs crash when ever you do heavy paging, or intense read/write activities. I am not sure if/when nVidia will have an offical patch or resolution but I will let you know if our supplier comes up with anythin better then "use the IDE drivers"

Ok here is my trouble. I have a machine that is NOT in a domain, nor was it ever. Encrypted files were created on the machine. Machine then gets horrible nasty virus/rootkit and bad user intervention. Reinstall wasn't an option that worked, yes it was done several time. Durring this process the HD was made unbootable. Can read the drive in another machine. What is the best/easiest method to get the NTFS encrypted off of the original hard drive? I am thinking it might be easiest to try to get the original drive bootable again. (which is what I will try first unless I can find an easier way. Mind you I have the drives not the original machine and not sure I can get the original drive to boot without reinstalling, and not sure if XP can make a dynamic drive a primary without deleteing the information never came up before.) Any reccomandations? Warnings? Words of wisdom? I am not afraid to use linux/unix. I have a linux live distro designed for file recovery that I will try soon as the HD comes back to me from the user. But honestly I am stumbling blind without a domain recovery agent:-(

"It might be Ghost, but the symptoms mentioned with the Ghost are a shutdown or reboot, but not "The machine simply powers off and will not come back online unless you unplug and replug the machine". I still say this is a hardware problem." It isn't ghost as I just got the first copy of ghost into the office the other day. As for hardware I think it has to be in PART hardware, however, like I said I cannot duplicate the issue. I would hope/think that if it was hardware ONLY it would duplicate it every time I plugged it in and out. Soon as I can find a device that can cause it reliably I would love to test it in a non-Windows enviroment. I tried that with a live version of Linux, but since it can be days or weeks between shut downs I cannot test it. I really think it may be a power spike like LLXX said, there is ONE of this model that ISN'T doing this, it has a slightly newer motherboard of the same model. All it's USB ports are "dead" IE you can plug something in and Windows, and a Live Linux Distro can't tell, but the device gets power. EXCEPT one port that the mouse was plugged into. Which is now totally dead and wont even power up a device. I will be looking more into the power spike concern, with the partially damageing the USB controlers in some way as that makes the most sense with the avalible data.

Yes have done that, and also can't see how atleast 10 machines could have their BIOS alterd at the same time.

First off I think this is a better forum for this as I have a significant suspicion that this is something that happend after a windows update (more on that below). If this is th wrong place let me know. At my job we have a bunch of machines from Boxx, one model, and one model only, shortly after the Decemeber Windows Updates, started simply shutting down when a USB device was plugged in. It is so far totally random on all of the machines in this line. I cannot reproduce this error. I have tried plugging in adn unpluging the devices that have been known to cause this on several machines, but no luck in duplicateing it even once. It have happend for sure with all of the following devices: USB Mouse USB Card Reader USB Flash Drive USB Hard Drive USB iPod connection The machine simply powers off and will not come back online unless you unplug and replug the machine, then works perfectly with nothing in the logs to indicate an issue, other then the standard "shut down wasn't expected" The reason i don't think this is purely a hardware issue is: It started on all the machines at about the same time. It has happend with devices that have been in use on the machines in question for months if not longer. We have had no USB issues with these machines in the 18+months we have had them till this started The only thing that makes me curious that it MIGHT be a hardware issue is that you need to unplug it before it will restart, suspecting that there is a power issue and by unplugging i reset a breaker of some kind. I am not sure if there is something in windows anywhere on any level that may control the amount of power sent to a USB device. if so its possible that somehow the update in the begining of December caused some kind of conflict with a number of variables that i cannot see. Yes this happens on front and rear USB panels, so miss wired front USB panels is ruled out. If you have every seen anything like this please let me know! If you have any ideas I could use to try to reproduce the error, or know anything about powering USB ports and Windows XPs invovlement in that if anything let me know, as I might be able to use that for more troubleshooting! Thanks!

I do not know of a way to control password resets and changes on a number of machines at once without a domain, inside a domain its fairly easy. Also as kyuuzo was saying there isn't any point for them to have local accounts. You can grant or refuse "log in locally" permissions, as well as make a specific user or all users "local admins" or "power users" allowing them to install and change things on the local machine while logged in. This may or may not be a good thing in your enviroment. In most domains the goal is to lock the user down as much as you can so they cannot do anything more then they need to. However I work in an enviroment where the users NEED to be local admins just for one specific job critical program to work so all security on the local machines is lost and I spend my time killing viruses and malware. Something to consider when you decide what rights a user will have to a machine.

I did that earlier today..... I was literally telling the machine "hello I AM the administrator, give me something to work with!"

If there is something with the page file, and since you can boot into safemode, simply remove it, then recreate it. That should get you back up and running. You need to remove it reboot then recreate. I assume you have run scandisk and or other programs that test the file structure of the drive? It may not be a "virus" but a rather horribly written screen saver, in which case most virus software wont pick it up. They tend to miss things that don't self propagate, hence effecting a fair number of people, or don't fit inside a set of rules on what behavoir they expect.

Actually that was my first thought as well, unfortuantly I had to do a restore from a backup to get it to work. As a network admin you can't do you job without google... I dare you to try:-) I did figure out that several of the network monitoring software options I was playing with, not only added their own little services etc to my newtork adapter, but also modified my tcp/ip stack. When I rebuilt there there were alot of things changed. I am pretty confident that intentionally or unintentionally that is what caused my issue. They were all from download.com, which I usually veiw as "relatively" safe. But since it worked before the installs, and not after I can only blame one of them. Now I need to solve the uber big boss with a virus issue.... and that has nothing to do with technical skill but trying to let him save face....

Updates... if I boot into safe mode it works perfectly fine.....

Ok first off before someone tells me to run hijack this, spybot, etc, been there done that, and not a single thing shows up in hijack this that I do not know exactly what it is and when I put it there, and nothing but a few tracking cookies came up in any of the 3 spyware things I ran. I have manually checked the host files as well as done a rootkit scan, and nothing new showed up. Here is the issue, after installing some software yesterday (which I have since removed and cleaned the registry with several programs and manually) I have been unable to get search results. When I click "search" nothing happens. If I do it in IE vs Firefox I get a "page cannot be loaded" error. I can search groups/new/froogle without any issues at all. But the search results for web or images will not load. I can hit the "feeling lucky button" and a relavent page loads without trouble. My personalized homepage loads no trouble. I can access google perfectly fine elsewhere in the office, and my home machine. I have watched what the firewall is denying and nothing shows up.... Has anyone come across this before? Or maybe knows why or how "web" and "images" are different from the other google topics in their searching and relaying information. This will greatly help me find the issue. I look forward to anything you might suggest or know!!

I have run across alot of weird issues, some similair to this when the page file was set to a size larger then there was free space. IE you set to 3mb-3gb and its at say 1.5gb and you fill up the hard drive so there is only 500 megs left. Then it tries to use all 3gb for something and nastiness ensues. If you can see from 98 that the HD or partition is nearly or totally full try to clean up some room. The server logs I went over this morning are good proof that Windows does not react well when the system drive runs out of space.... This should be rather simple and easy given you can access windows 98, and it can't hurt. I always like to try the easy fixes myself. You know that stuff you should do anyway like delete the 94gb of stuff you don't need and probably shouldn't have anyway.

Well if the WIN98 machine cannot ping the router I would say there is an issue. Odd ping issues in my experience have been mainly really wacky IPSEC settings or trying to ping a machine with XP SP2 firewall turned on. Neither of these seams to be the issue. I am however forced to ask why you would put any XP machine without SP2 on the internet, as I assume you are? Even professionals with multiple levels of protection would prefer not to put SP1 on the internet. Until the 98 machine can ping the router don't worry about it pinging the XP machine, and once you ping the router try the XP machine. Once you can do that then focus on seeing and sharing the files. We have ONE 98 machine here in our office and many of the shares have had to be created twice so that that machine can access it. 98 will not see any share/folder with "unacceptable characters" in it, namely a space. So once you can ping the 98 machine, ensure that the fold is shared without any spaces in the name or weird characters, that it is short, and that you make sure the proper permission for the share are in place, as well as the file/folder permissions if the files are on the XP machine. If you can ping the XP machine but still cannot see the files try going to the "run" box and typing in this \\machinename\sharename, obviously use the machine name for the machine in question and the share name for the proper share. We have always had issues with 98 browsing the network and have honestly found that for the one machine it was significantly easier to simply create permanent links to the few required shares. Other around might have had more imperative to make it work and might have better solutions.