A Black Screen of Death Day

I awoke this morning to the oddest message on the solid black screen of my PC. It said that I could only attempt to repair my Windows NT from the Windows NT setup disk. A couple of strange things here: 1. I was not attempting to repair anything. 2. This must be a really old message embedding in Windows XP, because I don't have Windows NT. 3. My system was running fine when I went to bed last night.

As I have mentioned before, I have a fairly new Dell XPS 410 and also as I mentioned before, doing diagnostics on the machine takes forever due to the dual 320GB hard drives in my RAID. Before going into diagnostic hell, I rebooted the machine a few times and always end up on the same error message, not even getting close to booting the operating system.

I rebooted to the diagnostic partition (one of the nice things about Dells) and ran the diagnostics for "Can't boot the OS." It ran fine till it got to the hard drive diagnostics. As I have said, they are very extensive and take eight hours to run on my dual drives. Well, I let them run for one drive and figured that since I am in a RAID, that is not the problem. So, I called the special Dell XPS support number. It took them about 35 minutes to correct the problem, but due to the diagnostics, it wasted most of my day.

The worse part is, though I know what corrected the problem, I can't tell you exactly what was wrong or how it got there. Just another of those black screen of death kinda days.