A hard drive slowly crashing (e.g. one of IBM's Deathstars) could show all the symptoms she saw (including "horizontal syncopation"). I've seen at least a half dozen Deathstars alone go out with varying degrees of quickness and they've all had odd display issues upon boot up. Usually if it's the video card or some other component it gets caught during boot up tests and the machine gives some sort of error message/beeps and it rarely continues trying to boot up.
In my experience if a machine can make progress booting up towards the login screen then it's often the hard drive that's begun failing and the output you see will vary in strange ways as the data that the drive is attempting to access (while booting etc...) becomes increasingly corrupted and un-useable.
By the same token it's also possible for something else to corrupt the data in such a way that the machine can't progress to booting up properly.
If nothing else, the hard drive is potentially one of the easiest things to test for in the event that the warranty service isn't up to par. It's easy enough to boot from a bootable CD in order to bypass a questionable drive.
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Date: 2006-03-13 07:17 pm (UTC)In my experience if a machine can make progress booting up towards the login screen then it's often the hard drive that's begun failing and the output you see will vary in strange ways as the data that the drive is attempting to access (while booting etc...) becomes increasingly corrupted and un-useable.
By the same token it's also possible for something else to corrupt the data in such a way that the machine can't progress to booting up properly.
If nothing else, the hard drive is potentially one of the easiest things to test for in the event that the warranty service isn't up to par. It's easy enough to boot from a bootable CD in order to bypass a questionable drive.