Dang'd PCs

I've just had to deal with a DELL PC that died as a direct result of Windows XP automatic update - it appeared to kill the hard drive. This was the 4th machine I'd heard this happen to, and discussing on the CM forum, it appears this is quite common. If you're lucky you can wipe the HDD and start again.

If you're lucky.

Matt wasn't. One new drive later, and we still can't restore the PC. Fortunately everything's backed up, but it's inconvenient.

The PC was going to be recovered remotely on Friday night, but that also went wrong. Just as a 'thought experiment' I tried to boot the machine into Knoppix from a CD. If you've never tried Knoppix, it's a 'live' version of Linux that comes on a bootable CD - pop the disc in the drive, boot from it and hey presto, in just a couple of mins you've a fully working PC that doesn't touch the HDD unless you tell it to. You can also recover data from un-bootable drives, as long as they can be read. However 20 mins later it's still loading. Hmmm.

Tried the Knoppix boot on another identical machine, but with less memory (256Mb vs 1024Mb). Took about 1 1/2 min to boot and worked perfectly. Double Hmmm.

Grabbed the PC, whipped out a memory module (down to 512Mb) and slap the knoppix CD back in. Presto, one live PC. Slapped the recovery disc in and it booted and loaded the recovery OS with no trouble.

Now I'm really puzzled. There's no reason for the memory issues. It was all good quality - Kingston, rather than some el bujeeto stuff - and the MOBO is capable of handling that much. So this begs the question, can Windows update damage hardware like memory modules? The machine had been a little slow before the upgrade, but was apparently fine after. I can see no reasonable way that software should be able to damage memory (HDDs are different, presumably the firmware controller gets corrupted) but RAM?

Weird.