the Way of the Turtle

THE WEEK OF THE CRASHED COMPUTER
(hopefully there will only be one!)
Saturday, October 7, 2006

Woke up Monday morning sneezing... hoped it was allergies but as Monday progressed it became clear it was a cold. At least it waited until after the Autumn Classic Du... took some cold medicine and went to bed very early. Ah, drug-induced slumber!

Woke up Tuesday when the cold meds wore off... 4 AM. Gah. Couldn't get back to sleep with my sinuses raging so I went to the computer to do some work... and found it unresponsive. Repeated reboots informed me that the boot volume could not be mounted - in other words, there was a major problem with my primary hard drive, which not only runs the computer but also stores all my work and personal documents. Fortunately, I knew I'd backed the docs up sometime after purchasing the most recent hard drive (a 300GB monster) of the collection of 4 that lurk inside my overworked Dell Dimension 4500. So all (!) I needed was a new drive, plus many hours of work re-installing Windows XP, the varous security programs I run, and (eventually) about a billion other things.

One trip to CompUSA and one-slightly-more-expensive-than-I'd-been-hoping-for Maxtor HDD later, and several hours of installing the necessities and getting the basics the work, and I once again had access to my remaining three drives, including the backup I made back in... sigh... February. Yup, that would be 7-8 months of stuff lost if I couldn't get it off the dead drive. (For those of you who back up regularly - yes, I'm one of those idiots who didn't. Though I've become a major convert to the weekly backup plan.)

Didn't look good initially - the 'pooter recognized the old drive but didn't seem able to access anything on it. But Saturday night I hit on the clever idea of running chkdsk on it first and letting it try to fix the errors. Several hours later - success! I was able to transfer a huge number of files from the old drive, including what appears to be most of my documents (though some might be corrupted - I won't know until I try opening them. The few I've opened so far do seem to be OK.)

So I've gone from planning to cry much of the weekend to dancing the Snoopy happy dance. Still have a ton of work to do to get the beast back to where I want it to be. Oh, yeah, and I have a backup to run tomorrow night...

JMH