When I woke up this morning I turned on my computer, and received a white screen stating that there was a hardware problem (didn't catch the rest), my tower was making a loud bleeping noise, and it said something about a memory dump.
I panicked and shut it down. It did the same thing in safe mode. I rebooted, again, in safe mode and the only thing that I could access was Task Manager (which was missing the taskbar/toolbar).
I rebooted again in safe mode, and ran dxdiag which said that no problems were found.
Then I rebooted Normal, and now it seems to be working.
Does anyone know how I could troubleshoot this occurrence, and determine what happened?
Note. My Task Manager Screen only partially displays so that's all I can see. (Tabs are missing, etc...)
I thought you said it is working now? Is the Task Manager still missing tabs, etc., or is it in normal mode and working fine now?
You said that it was beeping. Was it beeping over and over? And if so, does your case have any temperature sensors (it will look like a skinny cable with a little clear plastic tab on the end that has a small curved wire inside). If so, try going into your BIOS and checking to see if there are any alarm settings for computer's temperature. If there are, turn the off, because it is possible that your sensor went bad, and is relaying the wrong temerature to your BIOS, which in turn, warns you with those annoying beeps.
This most likely isn't the case, but I did run into this problem once with a fairly new computer, so it isn't unheard of.
For your task manager, if you have XP, double click on the task bar at the top, since the Process Manager has two views. As for your other problem... I don't really know... it's weird, to say the least.
I don't understand what happened. I lucked out because somehow the problem fixed itself. The same thing happened to a lady on Majorgeeks forum, and it happened to both of us on the same morning. Her computer didn't fix itself, and now she's been without a keyboard for 2 days.
Microsoft posted a security bulletin (MS05-051) about my error codes & warnings which stated that update KB909444 is the cause. This update had TONS of problems associated with it. It was hard to read through, and I didn't understand a lot of it. It had something to do with BIOS, COM, MSDTC & lots of other things.
I finally rebooted today, and it went okay. I seriously lucked out because I wouldn't have known what to do otherwise. My computer is pretty old, and I thought that it had finally died.
Huh. The Microsoft website basically said something along the lines of: "The critical files were messed up because they were renamed and not recognized by the computer." Or something like that.
Maybe it said "Your computer is messed up because you were mean to it and it doesn't like you."
Krit, sounds like you dodged a microsoft bullet. Scan your disc and make sure you click "attempt to repair". When you are sure all is well run ERUNT {www.snapfiles.com} and save the results. It will mirror your registry and you can fix problems in a snap by restoring the registry. It has saved me on more than one occasion.