Sometimes I just hate pc's

[tommykjensen]

This morning my secondary pc met me with a blue screen of death. And could not boot. Out and buy new harddisk, but now the pc could start even before I changed the disk. Strange....


Later when I wanted to move files from one disk to another on my primary pc XP started hanging and I booted. Should never have done that. Now XP won't start, it halts when it says "starting windows" after the logo has been displayed.

Anybody know how to fix that without reinstalling XP? All data seems to be present on disk. I can also start recovery mode from the CD but actually have no clue what to do there?

What a day.....

[Steve Parr]

I hate computers, they hate me.

Once I arrived at this realization, and prepared myself emotionally for it, life got a lot better.

I've run the recovery program twice (is that the one which takes your computer back to a previous date?). It was real easy to do, but I'm pretty sure Windows XP had to be running in order to do it.

Good luck, man. I have no advice to offer, just condolences and understanding...

Steve

[Michaelmjc]

Now if you had a mac.. none of this would have happened and you would have been a happy camper ;)

[tommykjensen]

I guess it helps writing because now I found the cause. A third disk in the pc, the one I was copying data from apparently is dead or something (bios sees it windows doesn't) removing it and I can start. Putting it back windows does not start.

So problem solved. I really really hates when this happens.

[tommykjensen]

Now if you had a mac.. none of this would have happened and you would have been a happy camper ;)

Go away with that mac vs pc religion war. I will ask a moderator to lock this thread if You or anybody else post something similar.

Yes I have seen Your smilie but I don't see anything remotely funny about this :mad:

[Michaelmjc]

Ya hard drives can be a pain in the butt sometimes.. On my PC the hard drive blew up the other day, definately wasn't expecting that.

Sometimes its better not to know anything about computers, they're such a hassle.

Sorry for saying that, you're obviously pretty upset about it. good luck, hopefully nothing important was lost.

[DavidW]

The only answer is backups - no matter what platform you're on. I've lost drives on various platforms.

SMART won't necessarily save you - I had a Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 (expensive 15000rpm U320 SCSI HD) go down in this workstation with no real warning whatsoever. Fortunately I had a backup that was only 36 hours old - poor by my standards, as my system normally backs up automatically every 24 hours, but the most recent backup had failed. I was fortunate to manage to get the failed drive back online for long enough to get a new backup - even then SMART said the drive was OK!

I back up to a large hard disk, the backups are automatically copied from that hard disk to DDS-4 tape, and I synchronise the hard disk backups over the network to a hard disk in another machine. The synchronisation to another machine currently is started manually, but I'm close to getting the synchronisation software starting automatically.

The only thing I don't have is a data safe.


The more layers of backup, the better.



David

[Hellashot]

Sometimes its better not to know anything about computers, they're such a hassle.

Unfortunately as they make computers and computer software more "user friendly", most people don't have a clue what to do when they encounter a problem (very similar to cars). Back 10 years ago when you had to know the correct settings, drivers to just install a sound card those who could install one knew how to troubleshoot. Now you slap a card in and it works. They are even working on changing the computer layout so you can "slide" cards in without opening the box sort of like Star Trek with their moveable chips.

There should be a "safe mode" start option when a boot does not finish. I also think your Windows XP CD should work as a boot disc. Change your bios to boot from CD first.

Did you scan the hard drive of your secondary PC that you were copying to your primary PC for viruses? You might have gotten a nasty one that caused your crash on your secondary. You DO have anti-virus and an internet firewall running, right?

[codex0]

Sometimes, if you're lucky (and the filesystem was FAT32), if you put a "dead" drive that's still spinning in a machine with another operating system (like slave it into a win98), you'll be able to retrieve some things. Problem is so few people use FAT32 anymore...