JDPFu.com 2025

So, I should have kept my mouth shut. After writing that last story, my laptop gets stuck during boot. Of course, it waited until I was on vacation. Leading up to that point, it had been fixable with a full, detailed , 3 hour scandisk. Now, it won’t get that far in the boot sequence. “Fix my computer” gets stuck. “Safe Mode” gets stuck.

Did I mention that Vista sucks?

I’ve performed the hardware tests. No issues. I think it is a logical problem with Vista’s file system. It get stuck loading crcdisk.sys when I watch the drivers being loaded.

Linux rescue disk … GO! I need to get my data and virtual machines off that machine before I can attempt to force it back to factory settings (assuming I can get to a boot prompt at all).

fixed … 11/30 … perhaps

I renamed crcdisk.sys and rebooted. All is well. Vista problem solving said that the problem is with Dell WiFi drivers. Google searches implied this driver file was for the built-in Creative Webcam. I find that very easy to believe, since Creative drivers have always been less than impressive to me.

12/4 Update

So, I thought the issue was fix. It wasn’t. I rebooted this morning to clear up a network issue and the BSOD happened in the same way again. Enough was enough. Out to the Dell Support site to get all the available patches, 22 of them. They range from a BIOS update to video drivers, to webcam drivers, to system information application updates, to DVD burner app updates. Anyway, they all appear to have installed cleanly, even the BIOS and my reboot was clean. I’m writing this from inside an ubuntu virtual machine running on the laptop. I’ve rebooted a few times, but not after VirtualBox has run. That is my last concern, is virutalbox leaving the system in a bad state or corrupting random drivers?