Woe is me! My computer crashed!

shortdj

Rackenfracken computer done crashed on me and I had to come to the public library to get my "forum fix".
I was able to get caught up with the going's on here and wanted you guys know that I should be going full speed again within a couple of weeks due to waiting for a service person to come fix my hard drive. I think I may have lost all those darn pictures that I had saved (would be a terrible thing if I did).

I wouldn't wish this problem on even the bad trolls in here.

Anyone else that may have had this problem that could give me some encouraging words?

Did I lose EVERYTHING?

Anyway, just to let anyone that may care know that I may be scarce for a short time, but I'LL BE BACK!

a2labmom

Oh, man! That stinks! I can sympathize with you. I have had my computer crash before, but lucky for me my hubby is a PC Tech and was able to rebuild things. Losing things did happen. Everything that was not backed up somewhare was gone. He had to wipe the hard drive clean and start from scratch. Lucky thing, I am paranoid about these things and maintain at least 2 copies of important things. We have 2 computers networked together, so we store things of importance on both.

Good luck getting the computer back up and running. Let us know how things are going.

LanLord

ShortDJ, I work for a large hard drive manufacturer. It's very unlikely that your data is unrecoverable, it just may be expensive to recover. There are services available (separate companies from the manufacturers) that can recover data from Nixon's 18 minutes of blank tape. but it is not without a cost. The first thing to do if figure out what kind of failure your drive experienced.

1- Older drives experience something known as stiction which can be fixed by tapping the side opposite to the interface cable when power is applied. The tap should be a short, sharp tap with a screwdriver handle. Stiction can be diagnosed by listening to the drive during powerup, there is a labored whine to the drive.
2- Accidental erasure or overwriting of the boot sector. There are utilites that can recover this, but it may be easier to place the affected drive into another system with the same operating system, then you can mount the volume and move data to a permanent storage location
3- physical damage. This depends upon the extent of the damage. Obviously if the drive is crushed, burned etc it would be very expensive to recover any data and this will be partial at best. If the drive was dropped it could be pretty easy to recover with the same solution as in #2
4- interface card failed. Drives have onboard electronics that can occasionally fail. This can be corrected both in and out of warranty by the manufacturer.
5- it can always be an issue with the operating system not correctly recognizing the drive due to failed patch or upgrade. These can be recovered, check with the operating system manufacturer first.

These are just a couple examples, but your data most likely is not forever gone, but it may be expensive to recover.

goyankeez

Sorry to hear that. My computer is two years old, and this is the thing I dread. Hopefully, I won't experiece the same misfortune. The only problem I have is when I lose a connection to AOL, or I have to restart my computer.

I had to come to the public library to get my "forum fix"

You need help.

Good Luck!!

Placid

Cd burners are nice

LanLord

Yes indeed, we use our own drives in our servers but we also have one hell of a tape backup schedule because anything mechanical will sooner or later experience problems.

shortdj

UPDATE!!!!! Thanks to the fine guy at IBM tech support (ROGER), I am now up and running after doing a cool thing called safe restore. I lost NOTHING at all, but had to go back to restore date December 2001 and just will have to re-delete some things that I took off (no big deal). Didn't lose any of my great pics I had saved or any addresses or anything, so all is GOOOOOD!

Hats off to computer geeks everywhere!

If I would have known that it would have been this easy to get it fixed over the telephone, I would have done it the day that it happened, instead of fearing the worst that my hard drive was dead and being without my computer for nearly a week!

Thanks to all the well wishers....I love you, man!

a2labmom

Welcome back, Deane. Glad it all worked out for you!

shortdj

Thanks, Beth----having to take care of my "forum fix" at the public library is NO FUN! It's good to be back on my own computer with NO time limits!

JLW

I wondered why none of the "techie wizards" suggested that? Too simple I guess...... I just had to do this for my dad on his iMac. (Yes, despite what the ads say, they DO freeze and lock up sometimes!)
Glad you're back!
Joe