No more than 5 minutes after I hung up with the Dell tech, my system shut down. When I tried to re-boot all I could get was a black screen with a blinking curser.
Seems like my DST error 2000-0146 bit me ! Hard drive not happy. Prolly the Boot sector.
After trying many different iteration of recover and restore disks, I ended up using my Win7 Install disk and re-installed the OS. I am thinking in retrospect, I should have done a repair using recovery console. Oh well.
But then, out of a whim, I rebooted and was able to do a system restore from a restore point that "somehow" remained on the system. So at least I was able to get some of my settings back, but not much else. I still had to re-install MS office and other things I want to use until my replacement HD arrive.
I was going to try using the Seagate DOS tools, which supposedly can repair several HD problems, but since Dell is sending a replacement HD, I'll just swap them out and start over and pray that this is the last problem with this Desktop.
I still have a fear that the MOBO has a problem, but I'll cross that bridge if, and when, I get to it.
I guess it's possible that a failing HD caused many of these problems, but in the back of my head, I still suspect I had multiple things going on at the same time.
I know FOR SURE that the Video card was bad, but that seems to be working fine for now.
I rebooted and went away for about 40 minutes and when I returned the system seemed to be in sleep mode. The power button was still white, but it was blinking.
What does that mean ?