Heat, Humidity and Hard Drive Failures
I think it no coincidence that some PC’s have been locking up the last couple of days. Here in the Midwest, temperatures are above 90 degrees (F) and humidity is somewhere north of 100%.
Unfortunately, dissimilar machines are exhibiting almost identical behavior. These PC’s, some W2K Pro and some XP Pro, boot to the blue GUI (not the BSOD blue), the mouse is active, but they never display the login prompt.
Naturally, these computers are poorly ventilated in the first place, and filled with dust bunnies in the second place.
One W2K machine responded nicely to an XP Pro upgrade; the XP Pro box, while giving a “Data Error Reading” when I try to select recovery console from the boot menu, seems unwilling to let SpinRite detect and fix the read error.
Frustrating and time consuming. If you have any similar stories, please post a comment with the details.
