Well, nothing wrong with a bit of hyperbole to attract attention :p
I've got the strangest problem with my PC, which is even vaguely related to the topic! I'm hoping that someone might be able to suggest some possible causes of it.
I put an SD card into the slot on my Dell monitor (connects via a USB output on the monitor to a USB port on the back of my tower), that had several large video files on it, four to be specific. I selected all four files, and tried to move them to my hard drive. The first two moved fine, but the operation aborted with a message saying that it could not copy because the "parameter is incorrect".
It hung explorer, so I ended the process, waited a few moments for it to restart automatically, and when it didn't, I ran it again as a task. Although explorer was now showing in the processes list, the PC still gave me no start-bar, so I did a CTRL-ALT-DEL Shutdown.
On reboot, I went back into Explorer without any problems, back to the SD card and then tried moving the third file on its own. Again the failure, but this time without any hanging, so I tried moving the fourth and final video file. This transferred successfully.
Decided to try and be clever .... I tried copying the only remaining file to a copy of itself on the SD card, figuring that maybe this would work better and I could try downloading that copy instead. It was going slowly but fell over again, this time with a taskbar-bubble (one of them yellow thingummies) talking about delayed write errors, like you'd get if you had HDD problems.
Well, I again had lots of explorer/hanging problems and I couldn't get very much to respond at all, so I went to hit the reset button on my case. As I had my finger touching it - but definitely no pressure applied - the machine rebooted.
When it came back, it appeared to have hung on post. It displayed the BIOS information and the CPU information at the top, with the "Press <DEL> to blah blah" message at the bottom. I thought it was totally kaputt, but after 60 seconds it continued through the rest of the post operations (picking up ram/hdds/opticals/etc) before giving me a message about a CMOS reset. I went in, checked all the settings and did a save of them.
Unfortunately, the same problem occurred as it reset ... it seemingly hung for 60 seconds (I've only ever seen it delay 2-3 seconds at that stage before) then went through as normal. When left to run into Windows it seemed fine but displayed a black screen between the "showing windows logo with green looping progress bar page" and properly displaying desktop and taskbar, the delay again lasting about 60 seconds.
I'm utterly and totally at a loss now. I don't even slightly see how a dodgy SD-card read could cause these bizarre booting problems (and everything else seems to run fine), but yet there seems such a strong link that I also can't see how it could be anything else.
I shall be removing and reseating every part in the PC tomorrow, but I was hoping that some of you might be able to suggest a few other potential causes of the most unusual problem. The PC is particularly new, by the way, just a couple of months old. I think this makes it beyond teething troubles but a long way before age-related failures.
If anyone can help, then I can assure you I am very grateful for your reply! :confused:
