Technical Woes
Posted by Patrick on Thursday, May 04, 2006When computers work, it is cool. When they break, it is far from cool. Kate's laptop went blue screen the other day, which normally corrects itself after a reboot... but this blue screen of death had much more emphasis on the death part.
Here's a message you don't want to see, ever:
Operating system not found. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to reboot
Hmmmm... I went through the usual voodoo and candle-lighting in hopes of get it going. It would almost boot up, but never quite get to the point where I could get the not-exactly-backed-up-email and files off the machine. Pretty discouraging stuff, not being able to recover the data.
And all that software you buy without getting the disc? Stop it. Just stop. Get the CD.
I tried booting the computer with a Linux live CD, in hopes of accessing the data on the drive, and had no luck. In a last desperate move, I put the drive into the freezer in hopes that the urban legand of frozen hard-drive-revivals was true. It was not. At midnight last night, I gave up, believing that the disk had clicked itself to death, never to share its data again. 
A day passes...
After work today, Kate and I went for a walk, and when we came back in, I decided just to try to get the data one more time. And... it worked!! I was out of my mind! I knew it would only be a matter of time before the drive gasped its final byte. I quickly copied Kate's documents and emails before the drive clicked to a halt.
The moral of the story? Back up your data today, and, maybe Toshiba drives are weak. Two years for the life of a drive? Come on.
Labels: Nerdery
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