My system went mad...

[bandieramonte]

Hello everyone;

Once again I need the valuable help of the members of this forum. Something very weird has happened to my system, I I will try to describe it the best I can:

By the time everything in my system was fine, I was trying to overclock it from factory settings to 3 GHZ. At first, my system went unstable many times as usual, because of the need to supply more Vcore to the processor. So I did all the tweaking in the bios to increase Vcore, entered windows, did some tests with Prime95, and some threads halted on fatal errors. So I had to adjust Vcore some more. Before increasing the Vcore a notch, the temps were about 50C when at full load, so I knew I had room to increase the Vcore a notch without damaging the processor. When I increased the Vcore in the Bios and reseted, this weird stuff happened.

When I got to the screen where I had to choose the user account with which to login to Windows, I clicked on my user and enter my password. As soon as I press enter, the screen goes entirely black and I'm greeted with only a medium sized dialog window informing me that the activation period of Windows has expired and that I must activate it. So I got 4 choices in this window:


1) To activate windows online : when I do this, a progress bar appears, just to end on an error saying that it failed to activate windows online.

2) To obtain access to my system with limited functionalities: when doing this, the only thing that happens is that my default web browser automatically opens with one tab, being for buying windows so I can activate it. But absolutely nothing else opens, no start bar appears at the bottom of the screen, my desktop does not appear either, and when I minimize the web browser the windows activation screen appears at the back, with the rest of the screen still being entirely black. I can do absolutely nothing, but just browse the internet, and that is how I could write this thread. Pressing the symbolic start icon of the keyboard is not working here either. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del does not work. All is dead. When I try to activate Windows with the tab that opens from Microsoft, it says that it can't activate it and that to do so, I must click the start icon from windows and bla bla bla, I can't do that because I don't have any start bar here.

3) To write again the key of my original windows product: writing again my original key would return an error saying that my key is invalid, and I'm writing the key as exactly the same as it appears on sticker that came with my original windows software, on the right of the "Product Key:" label.

4) To try other means of activation: this is completely useless since it tries to use a modem to connect my system to the activation service, when it later says the same as in 1); activation has failed.

And that is all... I'm just trapped with this window telling me to activate windows and windows never starts, is like being in other dimension. If I close this window, I would be kicked back again to the user account selection window. I don't think this issue is linked to the fact that I was overclocking when all this happened, or yes? Anyways, restoring the Bios to Fail-Safe setup wouldn't solve this.

I activated windows for first time around April 2008, and since then I've been enjoying Windows and its updates without problems. I don't have idea on what's going on, but I can't enter my system, I got a good deadlock here. These are my system specs, just in case:

OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit Edition
OCZ SLI Ready Edition 2x2 GB PC-6400 800 Mhz
(2x) Geforce 8800GTS Pcie 512MB GDDR3 3PORT Dual Dvi Tv Out Oc SLI
Western Digital WD3200KSRTL Caviar 320 GB SATA 3.5-Inch Hard Drive
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Sound Card ( 70SB073A00000 )
Thermaltake W0131RU 850W Toughpower SLI Cross-Fire Ready Modular Power Supply
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 quad-core processor, 2.40GHz, 8M L2 Cache, LGA 775
Cooler Master RR-CCH-ANU2-GP Gemin II Dual 120mm Fans CPU & Motherboard Cooler
Nforce 680I Lga 775 Dc MAX-8GB DDR2 Atx 4PCIE 2PCI X-fi Aud Esata

Please help me here, I'm doomed if I can enter my system. Maybe I'm completely lost and this is the silliest thing that is very easily solved. I hope that is the case..

Thanks a lot to everyone who will help me.

[DL126]

Had a similar experience recently with a customer's PC.

Formatted the HDD & reinstalled Windows XP.
Had to call Microsoft to reactivate the the thing.
After doing so, I installed video drivers ....
WPA went crazy ... had to do the whole activation thing again.

I don't know what caused it, did the same thing as yours, wouldn't let me in until it was done.
I didn't waste any more time on it ... just called again and got it done.

I know this isn't any help ... but at least you know you're not alone.

[FZ1]

Overclocking can cause system instability and damage OS files. This is pretty common. A lot of people will have a separate boot disk to use while OC tweaking so as not to corrupt their main OS drive.

[bandieramonte]

Overclocking can also damage OS files? I've never heard such thing, I thought that system instability and hardware damage because of high temps were the only possible negative results out of it.. but damaging files?

I just got one hard drive disk here, so I couldn't have the OS in a disk independently. There must be other way around instead of formatting my HDD, that would be incredibly exhaustive for me, considering the huge amount of files in it, updates and more.

I could enter my system in safe mode, but without networking functionalities. But I don't know if I can do any useful repairing while in this mode. I will keep on trying here while someone here suggests the solution.

Thanks.

[martini161]

try booting up with your XP disc and doing the checkdisk utility

[FZ1]

Overclocking can damage any file on your drives. I guess I should qualify that by saying failed OC attempts. If your pc crashes while writing to the HDD, odds are good that something got corrupted. Same thing with BSOD. Many times it is a memory error and if data in memory gets hosed, it gets written that way too.

[bandieramonte]

I could solve the problem. I will post the solution, and maybe someone with the same problem as me can save himself..

What I did was to enter my system under the safe error-proof mode scheme, since this was the only was to access my system. After that, I just restored my system to the last restoration point, before my system started to fail. And then, I could finally access my system on the normal mode, but since strangely enough windows still kept asking me to activate my product, I did so and the process succeeded. So I'm now using my system on normal conditions, but with hardware on factory settings again....

So, the most obvious question now arouses in my mind: How to overclock on a way that no files would be ever corrupted?

I already know how to overclock without burning my hardware pieces here, but ensuring software reliability is still to be know by me. Any suggestions here? I'm wanting to play Far Cry 2 on Very high settings smoothly enough