My Computer Crashed. Now What?

Computers crash for lots of reasons. Usually it's an incompatible driver or virus that will crash your computer so I tend to shy away from automatic updates and don't ever download software unless I absolutely need it.

Even then, I'm really paranoid and run a virus scan to make sure my computer won't crash sometime in the future. And cross my fingers when install updates from Microsoft.

But with the right protection, your computer should never really crash due to driver updates or a virus. So, what really is the root cause of a crashing computer.

Component Failure

Eliminating the typical driver problem, your computer is probably crashing from a component failure. Fans fail, CPUs overheat and die, motherboards short, power supplies simply die. And yes, disk drives do fail.

Unlike ten years ago, computers are so fast and powerful today you probably will not have the need to buy a new computer unless you go an upgrade to Windows Vista. Keep that in mind, it very typical that you will have your computer for at least two years and perhaps longer.

In my case, my computer is over 6 years old and had the motherboard crash twice. The first time my computer crashed it would power up the motherboard only when I disconnected the disk drive. So I simply ran out to Fry's and bought a new drive.

Diagnosing Computer Crashes

Diagnosing a computer crash simply is very difficult to do. Usually your prognosis is wrong. My assumption of a bad disk drive was wrong because as soon as I plugged in a new drive, the crash still persisted.

The CPU had power so it wasn't the power supply. Or was it? Was the extra power to the drive causing a load issue? This time it was getting late, so I went to BestBuy to pick up a new power supply.

So proud, I installed the new power supply, double checked the connections then waited for it to boot up. You guessed it, same crashing symptom.

Now there are only three other possible things that could go wrong and I'm not batting 1000 right now. Very frustrated, the next thing to do is to get a new motherboard that will work with the CPU and memory I already have.

Now it's too late to go to the store and the computer crash will have to wait until tomorrow.

When you replace a motherboard for a computer that is over two years old, it's very difficult to find one that will work with your existing CPU and memory. After spending an hour looking at motherboard specs, I found one that would work with the processor and memory I had. The new Gigabyte motherboard would replace the presumably dead ASUS motherboard that was crashing.

Motherboards are simply a pain in the rear to replace since there are many connections that have to be right or things don't turn on. After carefully labeling all the old wires, carefully removing the CPU the new motherboard was installed in about an hour.

Most big league baseball players would love to bat 300, and I just succeeded in batting 333 cause the motherboard was the cause of the computer crash. Except, that now the Gigabyte BIOS sees the geometry of the drive different than what the ASUS did. Big problem.

One thing I did learn long ago was to partition disk drives so that your data is isolated from the operating system. That way if your computer or disk crashes, you can recover your data.

So all I had to do was reinstall Ubuntu on my Linux dedicated server and not touch my Windows and data partition. This is exactly what I did to fix my computer crash.

Now nearly four years later, my computer crashed again. I resolved back then that I would never go through this headache again and will show you exactly how I recovered from this crash and hopefully when your computer crashes, and it will, you can quickly recover from it.