Old lesson re-learned

For the first time in several weeks last night I went to bed a happy man. No, not for that reason… The reason was that I at last managed to crack the many computer problems that have been dogging me. In a previous post I mentioned that they all started when one of the secondary disk drives in my main computer crashed and I lost a considerable mount of important data, including the engine hour records for my Savannah. I managed to get just that one file back but much other data was still lost.

Then on top of all that, while I was trying to deal with the lost data problem the new CPU that I fitted in my computer by way of an upgrade began to run incredibly hot – dangerously so, at 100 degrees C which is its maximum before it shuts down before damage occurs, so that was another problem that had to be solved. I surmised that the root cause was a failure of the CPU water cooling system that I’d installed when I built the computer back in 2022 so went ahead and purchased a replacement from Amazon.

Fitting it meant dismantling virtually the whole machine as I had to extract the motherboard in order to fit a new cooler mounting plate and when I’d finished and had the machine back in one piece it failed to restart. It was totally and completely dead. Now Amazon have a great little scheme for various products, especially for many compute components, whereby they offer ‘second hand’ or ‘good as new’ items at reduced prices. If you read between the lines these are often brand new, unused items whose packaging has been damaged in the warehouse and can represent really good bargains.

On the other hand, they could be items that have been returned by previous buyers who have damaged them and sent them back for a refund without declaring the damage and often there can be no practical way for Amazon to test them before offering them for resale at a reduced price. My replacement cooler was one such item which left me in a complete quandary. My initial reaction for my computer’s failing to restart was to put the problem down to the cooler. It’s wiring is quite complicated and I thought that maybe a previous buyer had screwed it up and shorted the cooler out, but how could I test it?

But it got worse. I then tried replacing the new cooler with the old one which I knew was probably faulty as it was allowing the computer’s CPU to heat up, but it did at least allow the machine to boot to a running system while it was doing so. The result was a disaster. Even with the old cooler installed my machine now remained totally dead and I began to wonder whether I had unknowingly done something stupid while installing the new cooler which had possibly shorted something out and destroyed the motherboard. But, once again, how could I test it?

I’d already packed the new cooler up and requested a return and refund when I had a last desperate idea. I have what was a brand new motherboard which I think I foolishly damaged but which I knew powered up but did not fully boot into a running system. I wondered what would happen if I swapped the motherboards and installed the new cooler on the faulty motherboard. Now it just so happened that late yesterday evening I’d been watching a video on Youtube by someone who had purchased a totally dead computer on Facebook Marketplace for peanuts and got it running within minutes as a result of one simple measure, one that you learn about when you first start messing around with computers but which I’d forgotten and haven’t applied for donkeys years. It’s called resetting the CMOS.

CMOS stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor and in computer terms it’s a small memory chip on the motherboard which is powered by an on-board battery. The chip contains the motherboard settings which are stored in the factory but which can be subsequently modified either intentionally by the user or inadvertently by events. This hit me like a kick in the teeth. Resetting the CMOS is done by shorting across two pins on the motherboard and only takes 10-15 seconds. And I hadn’t done it.

So at around midnight last night I stripped apart my complete machine yet again, reset the CMOS on the ‘damaged’ motherboard which I knew would probably power up but not run and installed that with the new cooler that I’d had to unpack again. And bingo! Sure enough it and the new cooler powered up but sadly, the machine would still not fully boot. However, it told me that the new cooler was perfectly OK, so what about if I reset the CMOS on my previously working motherboard which had been running but now appeared to be dead and would not now start and reinstalled it with the new cooler?

And know what, it sprang into life. So there I was at about 1.00 am putting everything back together and then putting the machine through its paces. It was brilliant. It ran like a Swiss watch, totally silent and with its new CPU and an additional stick of RAM (memory) faster than I’ve ever known it. How crazy is that, after all the problems I’ve had. The images below show the machine running. The cooler fans change colour, which is the latest fad among ‘gamers’ but most importantly, the temperature of the CPU is being kept incredibly low by the new cooler, at not much above room temperature, which is amazing.

But on top of that I have more good news which is the cherry on the cake. While all this has been going on I’ve also been putting my ‘backup’ machine together and trying to recover the data I lost using two pieces of specialised software, Disk Drill and Recuva. The good news is that I’ve managed to recover ALL of the key data from the two disk drives involved, one that was internally damaged and the other which I must have inadvertently wiped during the data recovery process.

And there’s also a possibility that I may be able to recover even more, although I’m now not too bothered as what’s left is only old data that I was ‘hoarding’ for old-times sake. So now I can get on with reassembling the recovered data on the two machines, my main computer and the ‘backup’, so I can get back onto other pressing matters. Like fitting the new screen in my Savannah and the work in my garden. Happy days at last!