So, chances are, I’ve probably built, configured, upgraded, fixed, hacked, or tweaked your computer in some way (that sounded dirty, my apologies).  However, it’s finally time I humble myself and scream “HELP!”

My operating system (OS) recently crashed on me.  I’ve been doing all my e-mail from my iPhone, web browsing from work laptop, and trying to reinstall on my main box.  I built a new PC over the past summer and initially wanted to put Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ipex – Linux) on there.  However, I ran into problems, which most homebuilt PC’s tend to do.  Therefore, I settled on Vista.  Since I built it myself, I put more than enough power in it and figured Vista would run fine.  And I was correct, ran great for about 7 months … and then one random, mid-week day … BOOM!

I was updating my Opera web browser and the OS messages started flashing.  It wasn’t a virus, but something was corrupted.  I ran Vista’s chkdsk utility and all errors were said to have been fixed.  I was able to restart and for about 1.5 weeks, I was fine.  Well, Wednesday night, BOOM again, same issue.  I left it for Thursday night when I could putz all evening.  What a joke that was, I putzed all evening and still to no avail, I couldn’t even boot into Safe Mode!  Luckily, I have 750 GB’s of fun (or extra hard drives worth of space) and had all my main files backed up.  So…moving into Friday night, late Friday night, I was able to get Vista to reinstall.  Then Saturday … BOOM again!

I got home from the Pens game, and when I turned my monitor on … Black Screen.  Now, I was furious, frustrated, and in need of my main box.  I restarted, Black Screen.  Frustrated as could be, I left it as is for Sunday (now).  So after more black screens, no Vista nor Ubuntu 8.10, I’m running a  memory test looking to see if I have a bad memory module.  I’m really hoping that’s not the problem as I don’t want to spend any cash.  But it wouldn’t be that bad I guess, as I could hopefully then get the reinstall to work!

On a side note, the reason I couldn’t get Ubuntu 8.10 to work was because I kept getting thrown to the ‘initramfs’ screen.  Anybody have any input?  I tried forums like crazy in the past, but to no avail.  I recently see it has something to do w/ a RAID configuration?  I don’t have a RAID going on though, even though my mobo & bios support one.  Is there a feature I need to change?  I found from an Ubuntu page, http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/810rc:

Boot degraded raid setting

Traditionally, booting an Ubuntu installation with the root filesystem on a degraded RAID drops the system into a busybox prompt in the initramfs. This is the safest choice as it will prevent any further possible harm to data and let administrator pick what to do, but was causing issues with server hosted in remote locations. A system administrator can now statically configure their machines to continue on booting even if a disk is bad in the array by issuing the following command:

echo "BOOT_DEGRADED=true" |
sudo tee -a /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/mdadm

Additionally, this can be specified on the kernel boot line with the bootdegraded=[true|false] parameter.

I’m going to try this, sure won’t hurt me at this point, any thoughts, experience??