 | By Fred Langa Few things can ruin your day faster than seeing an error message pop onto your PC’s screen. While most Windows error messages can actually help you solve problems, I explain today a few that remain hopelessly arcane. |
Don’t be stymied by arcane error messages
Joe Preston encountered one of Windows’ least-clear and most-useless error messages:
- “A new problem has crept into my Windows XP Home machine. I can’t add files to a CD-R anymore. If I try to add a file while the disk is spinning, I get the Blue Screen of Death that states I have a ‘bad pool header’ (whatever that means).
“And when I’m in a Windows utility like Explorer or Power Desk 6, if I highlight a file and hit Delete, the program fails. This also happens if I’m in Word or Excel and try to delete a file from the Open dialog box.
“These problems all seem related, and while I can’t verify it, they seem to have appeared after I upgraded to Office 2003. Do you have any ideas as to where I can look?”
Even digging into this error message’s numeric content won’t help much. For example — and I’m not making this up — if “parameter 3″ is 0×3, then the error message is telling you “the read-back flink freelist value” is indicating that “the pool freelist is corrupt.”
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