Triumphant!

Woots I finally fixed the darn thing. After only 2 days did I realise the problem might not be in the software, rather in the hardware. Dug around the inner casing of the computer. First swap the RAM around. Next unplugged the IDE cable. Finally went to look at the most unlikely place of all, the CD drive. Guess what? Houston, we have a problem. The CD drive cable connector is out of place! Or rather, one pin of the connector has came out. Plugged it back in and voila, no more BSOD (***STOP 0x000000A5 (0x00000001, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000 btw). Like what the hell man. This one little pin caused me to fiddle around so much as to make Windows Vista unbootable. More specifically, I previously installed Linux openSUSE distro on the machine. During my frantic panic during the initial occurance of the problem, I thought Linux was causing a conflict as I get a kernel panic while loading it. So I erm... happily wiped out the Linux partition and the GRUB partition. What a no brainer that was man... I ended up with a system that reads "DISK READ ERROR. PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". Obviously pressing enter doesn't work. But heck, since I've repaired Windows getting into BSODs, I was easily able to use Windows Vista installation DVD to do a repair to the MBR. Looking back, the power cable is stretched just a wee bit too tight, maybe I need to get a longer cable. Was lucky that this time it didn't do any damage to the hardware though. At the very least I will know what is wrong the next time that bloody (er... its not really red... bluey?) BSOD shows up.