[wannabe1]

Do you access Recovery Console from the Hard Drive or from the CD?

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The hard drive.

[mountaineer 62]

The hard drive.

[wannabe1]

I'm wondering if having the Recovery Console installed as a boot option is causing your problem. Is the Recovery Console an available option on the installation cd?

[mountaineer 62]

I'm not sure. I added the recovery consol option to the boot sequence after the problems started. I thought that it might help in trouble shooting.

[wannabe1]

Boot into Recovery Console. At the prompt, type fixmbr and press "Enter". Reboot.

Does this help?

[mountaineer 62]

Ok. After I type fixmbr enter I get the following message:

"This computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid Master Boot Record.
FIXMBR may damage your partition tables if you proceed.
This could cause all partitions on the current hard drive to become inaccessible."

Thought I better check with you first before I take the plunge.

[wannabe1]

Is your data backed up?

[mountaineer 62]

I have a complete image backup +/- 1 month old. If I do a image backup now it will take about an hour. It would probably be smart to backup now so I won't lose all this thread etc.

[mountaineer 62]

My last complete image was done on 24 June.

[wannabe1]

Yep...go ahead and back up....unless you can live with a two week old backup. We may not even need it, but better safe than sorry.

Do you have a floppy drive on your machine?

[mountaineer 62]

Yes, I have a floppy drive. I make my image backups with Acronis True Image on the hard drive. I also have a external hard drive I could use if you think I should.

[wannabe1]

Is the external drive connected when you start the machine? If it is, disconnect it and reboot...see if that changes things.

[mountaineer 62]

Good news. I made a complete image backup using Acronis True Image. I then activated Acronis Recovery Startup Manager (had been inactive). Rebooted the system and non-system disk message did NOT come up. I think that activating the recovery startup manager cured the problem. So that problem looks like it has been solved. The "run dll as an application has encountered a problem and needs to close" problem still appears on the desk top and needs to be manually closed. Any ideas on how to get rid of this message?

[mountaineer 62]

Fixed the other problem. It had to do with my ATI video card. Looked at msconfig startup programs and unchecked ATIRW.exe and the problem disappeared. When you get mad enough and think hard enough you can sometimes get lucky and surprise yourself with what you really know.

[wannabe1]

Good job!

What'd you need me for?

Seriously, that was good (and lucky) troubleshooting. I'll remember that Acronis can give that symptom when not activated...it's a new one on me. It's in the bag of tricks now, though.

Any other problems I can get you to figure out?

wannabe1