Data Stream Problem after PSUUpgrade

[car86]

I recently bought an HP Pavilion m9402f with Vista Premium and later realized I needed a graphics card but that the power supply would not take a decent card--a common reason for replacement PSU's, I have since learned.  After researching and talking to HP and P C Power, I bought a Silencer 500W from Newegg.  I installed it today, taking care to note placement of plugs (took notes and photo's of it) and making sure to be gentle around the motherboard and not to knock anything around. 

I then powered up and a black screen started doing a check and it said, "Unable to read USN journal data stream."  Somewhere in the sentence, it had the $ ] symbols.  I had no idea what to do, and the computer then went into Windows, then a popup said that Voice Recognition could not start. I learned that Photoshop Elements is inaccessible. At one point while trying to access that program (PSE), I had a window pop up to say that Windows Indexing could not continue, or something like that--Sorry, I cannot remember exactly what that said and have been unable to reproduce it.  

I did shut the computer down and go over every connection, and then restart.  Right now, I am writing this on that same computer; it's just that I know things are not quite right and I really would like to have PSE back.  I'm leary of reinstalling it until I can learn what this situation is all about.  I notice that the hard drive has 2 plugs in it, one from the PSU and one from (to?) the motherboard.  I see at least one other connector there but am not sure what that one is.  It was not connected to the original PSU, and is still empty.  Oh, I forgot to say:  when the computer first starts, it goes to a blue screen and gives me a few minutes to choose setup or one of three other choices.

So I don't know if my connections are somehow faulty or if something was "tripped" when I did the upgrade.  I did make sure everything was shut down properly before shutting down the computer and beginning the upgrade, and I kept touching the metal chassis to keep myself from delivering a shock.  Thanks in advance to anyone who can shed light on this.

[erico]

Hi,

 The meaning of "Unable to read USN journal data stream."  is impending hard disk failure. You can check the disk with a HDD S.M.A.R.T reporting utility to see if that is true. Here is a link to a SMART utility.You would be wise to repair the errors on your system disk with chkdsk c: /f at the command prompt. FYI the second connector on the SATA HDD is the connector between the SATA connector on the motherboard and the HDD. Thus it is the HDD bus.

After you do the chkdsk, it might not be a bad idea to do a Vista system restore to a date before you made the PSU change. Control Panel -->System --> Advanced System Settings -->System Protection Tab. That shoud fix your Photoshop Elements problem without requiring a reinstallation of the program.

Regards,

Eric

[car86]

Thanks Erico. I have an update. After I posted here I contacted HP using live chat and one guy told me to go through the bios and do the smart check, then to check the motherboard. The smart check passed, then I was directed to remove ram and start the computer, listening for the beep, and if the beep was absent, the motherboard was bad. I am thankful that the motherboard complained loud and long, over and over.

I got back with HP, and another tech answered. When this one learned of the Usn message I was getting, he said the hard drive was getting ready to go bad, and that he would send me another. I told him about the HD passing the bios check, and he said that test only checked 2 things, and the fact that the pc doctor diagnostics test (I ran that one after posting here) reported failure of the surface scan test means that the hd is going south.  I did download the SMART program a few minutes ago, but it encountered problems gathering info. Everything points to hard drive failure.  I tried to use systerm restore but it said there was damage that prevented the restore.  I see that the fact that it happened after the installation of the psu must be coincidental. Come to think of it, the computer did seem a little senile on a couple of boots, before the new psu came along, but I'm having trouble remembering exactly what happened to make me notice that. Hmm...maybe I'm having some failure in my biological CPU!

Yes, I saw that the second (and smaller) connector went to the motherboard.  That third connector wasn't stuck to anything.  I don't think I was really clear when I mentioned that.  I told my husband I was going to have a smoking computer when I got through with upgrades, and yep, it's smokin alrealy!

Actually, most things are moving along nicely, and if not for the inaccessibility of PS Elements and the error messages, I might not even realize there was a problem. 

[car86]

Another update for anyone who may be interested or having the same problem.  I'm waiting on my new hard drive from HP--it hasn't had time to get here yet.  Anyway, this morning I turned on the computer to see what would happen and the light blue screen came up wiht a mouse pointer on it.  Pretty shade of blue, but not good for much.  I got on my son's oomputer and someone said to leave it there and let it do something, so I did.  It took a while but it slowly began to go into recover mode and, without my inserting the recovery disks, it broght itself back to factory condition.  Apparently it was able to use its factory image.  It now passes both surface scans, and I do not get the "Unable to read USN journal data stream" statement any more. 

I don't know a whole lot about hardware, but I'm  guessing the bad sections have been corded off and the computer is not using them, and that the hard drive can still fail due to whatever pysical defect caused the original problem.

[erico]

Hi,

I recommend that you follow the HP rep's advice and replace the HDD with the new one when it comes. If you have an external HDD, save all you documents there so you won't lose any data. Just out of curiousity, what does the SMART utility report now about the condition of your HDD?

Regards,

Eric

[car86]

Yes I am definitely going to switch to the replacement harddrive.  I have online backup.  After I read your last post, I redownloaded the SMART utility, and when I tried to use it, it said there were errors gathering the info.