Noob helping out an old friend

[seanthanna]

My recently deceased friend's dad is trying to revive an old arcade that his son made in hopes that his son's friends will all make it a point to come round the house and visit

While his reasoning may be flawed (we'll be there regardless), I want to help him get this thing rebuilt and working.

I am a network/systems engineer and very well versed in the intricacies of networking, hardware, and software. That said, I've never been much of a gamer and know just about nothing about this rabbit hole (as I'm learning) of a hobby.

All I know is that this system was working perfectly fine about 5 years ago but all the sudden one day they turned it on and the attached picture is the error they get.

Without knowing anything about anything and not being able to physically examine it yet, I'm assuming the issue is that there are two disks in the system (one for the OS (WMC) and one for the data) and the data disk has failed which is causing these errors.

Before I start digging too much further, can anybody provide any insight looking at just this error message?

I can certainly get more details once I get in front of the PC but again, I'm just not that familiar with this stuff so I don't even know when I'm in front of it how to get it to boot to the actual OS instead of the front-end loader.

Any direction is much appreciated.

[Draco1962]

I am Sorry to hear of the loss of your friend and sure that we will try our best to help.

That being said, is it possible for you to obtain the gameex.ini and the log.txt files from the machine and post it in reply?

Also, hold onto the data disk for now until we have a chance to look at those files as the log.txt image is not complete or clear enough to tell what is going on. From what I could make out may not be a matter of a bad data disk, but uncertain without the requested files. Thanks.

[seanthanna]

Thanks for the reply. I will see what I can do to get those files. At this point I'm thinking it may be best to just have him remove the HDs and send to me to access using a USB/SATA adapter.

[Draco1962]

You may run into a slew of issues depending on how the cab is setup if you remove the drives. If at all possible it may be best to keep things intact and only remove the drives as a last resort. Will it boot to the Windows desktop at all? If so, it may be preferable to try to remote into the PC if it is on a network or can be networked.

[seanthanna]

It's not on a network so I'd have to go there to work on it which isn't a problem. It doesn't boot into windows though...goes straight to this loader as far as I can tell so how would I bypass that? Run safe mode or something?

[Draco1962]

If it is a cab setup, likely it was setup to hide the OS using HideOS program. I do not use it but you should be able to use Sage Mode to boot into the OS. It may be possible to Alt-F4 when the window appears, then go to Start-Run, type Explorer.exe in the Run field, hit Enter, to load Windows Explorer. From there you should be able to acquire the needed files as well as check on the health of the data drive. Again, your friend may have installed an ipac or other similar boards to interface with the arcade control panel OS hence my caution to work from the cab if at all possible.