Twice this week I’ve been thrown this message in my face. First it was a friend of mine who couldn’t get his computer starting, the last time it was me. After the “Boot Disc Failure” message, BIOS tries to help out by suggesting you insert the system disc. At first I thought it meant the install CD for my OS, later we discovered this wasn’t the case…

You might think your drive is gone to heaven, but on the other hand it might be something as simple as the cables not being properly attached. Over the phone I instructed my friend to open up the desktop (more like the “black box” in this case) and look for a black “thingy” (that’s HD for the more experienced one), then disconnect and reconnect the wide gray cables. And voila, everything went back to normal. I had to do exactly the same this morning and thank God and knock on wood and all that, it worked. I suppose you would have to invest in a new HD and serious amount of time otherwise to get the systems up and running as before. I’m now in the middle of creating a more decent backup plan…

I’ll post more stuff on other hardware related issues in the future, as most individual parts have their own specific symptoms. Instead of spending additional euros on a service person doing what you could have done, you might spend those euros on something else (like more hardware…).

Earlier this week I discovered I was unable to play some of my own personal videos (*.AVI) on neither my laptop at home nor my desktop in the office. The most frustrating thing about it was that I couldn’t get a decent error message from any of my mediaplayers. Most of them just crashed or they continued at 10% of normal speed (very annoying). Media Player told me that an “unknown error” just occurred, so that didn’t help me much either. Even intense “googling” didn’t sort the problem.

When something that used to work suddenly stops working you better remember what you installed last. In this case I did (for a change) remember, and it was interVideo DVD copy. Apparently this release has some issues with one of the Morgan codec’s, or more precisely doesn’t install it/them properly. As a result some formats are unsupported cause the Morgan codec’s breaks down on execution.

Solution came with a nifty little app called GSpot. With this “Codec Information Appliance” I was able to isolate the problem. The problem with the faulty codec’s from Morgan was simply resolved by re-installing the original codec’s found at Morgan’s website. However this is not the only incident where Windows and media codec’s doesn’t walk hand in hand, but so far Microsoft haven’t written anything helpful on the subject. Thank God for those small helpful apps and gadgets people develop to make life easier on the rest of us…

With GSpot you can open any media file and get current status. It will tell you which codec’s you need and also if the ones you have are not behaving properly like in my case. More or less all the info you need to get the files playing, and your system back to normal.

P.S. Yes you’re right, I never said anything about why I need a DVD copier