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Computer Nightmare
October 02, 2007This is the one thing that can happen that scares the heck out of computer users like myself.
A massive hard drive failure.
Just the mere mention of it strikes fear in the hearts of many....
Well, it happened to me last week.
First things first...being a professional photographer, I have a more elaborate system of backing up and saving all of my photos (something like 75,000 of them currently).
They were all safe and sound on an external hard drive... thankfully.
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So...on Thursday last week, I was restarting my computer after I updated a driver or two. I was in the process of doing a couple of renovations to my 3-yr 9-mth old machine. I installed 2 gigabytes of RAM about half an hour earlier, and the old warhorse computer was flying along.
I had also just purchased a medium-range graphics card and new 400-watt power supply for my computer, but I had not got it in the mail as of yet (I actually got the package today from the UPS guy.
So anywho, after the reboot, I tried to launch Adobe Photoshop..... and I got this weird message saying something about it couldn't find a file to launch and it shut down Photoshop before it even got going.
"Strange" I thought. So I tried to launch Internet Explorer instead...and got the same kind of message. It couldn't find the files in the .exe to launch.
Okay...this isn't good.
After staring blankly at the screen trying to think through my rather limited knowledge of what might be happening...the computer shut down.
On it's own...and rather abruptly.
It came back to life, and almost got into Windows...and died again. But this time, I heard a noise I had never heard before come from my computer.
It kinda sounded like..... like the jet engine from the FedEx plane in the movie CastAway. You know, after the plane crashed into the ocean, and the jet engine in the water behind Tom Hanks is still spinning...but then explodes.
Yeah, a sound kinda like that came from my computer.
It didn't register at first what that sound could have been....but I unplugged everything from the back of the machine, and got ready to face the bad bad bad bad news that I probably knew was coming.
I packed up and headed to Best Buy, because I knew those Geek Squad folks would be able to more quickly diagnose and hopefully help. They opened the machine up (as I had done countless times before)...tried booting up the machine and the guy just kinda looked up at me and said...
"That sounds like a hard drive failure."
That may have well been the sound of a knife going into my heart. I asked him back "Are you sure?" He went and got his supervisor, who merely stuck her hand inside the machine by the hard drive and said "Yep, that thing is pretty much fried." It was blazing hot. They're not supposed to get that hot. I've heard stories about guys actually pulling their crashing hard drives in a freezer for about 15-20 minutes and having just enough time to pull a few files off before it totally fails.
They were going to charge be more than $100 for data recovery if they could pull anything off of the drive.... but I declined. I could try at home for free (I haven't yet, but will probably today or tomorrow).
With a dead hard drive, I was left with only a few decisions.
A: Get a new hard drive for the nearly 4-yr old machine. I still have the system restore disks, so I could get the machine back up and running....but it's still an old machine.
B: Get a new computer. I was planning on it after my tax refund check anyways...something with a new processor and built for speed and photo editing.
I chose the latter... and spent about $720 on a brand new CPU that is pretty much loaded for speed. It will be my main system for a while. But I have plans to replace the hard drive on the old machine eventually, and keep that one around as my Internet playing around computer.
I'd like to keep the new computer pretty much as a photo editing computer and maybe even keep it completely off the internet (unless I need to download updates and whatnot). That was the plan all along anyways... have 2 working machines for separate tasks.
I was lucky.... everything I really cared about (all of my photos) were "safe and sound" on an external hard drive. But even so, I'm a little freaked out. The small LED on the front of my 150 gigabyte external hard drive has worn out. It's been almost 3 years (Christmas 2005) and that has be a bit scared.
I'm probably going to ask for a new HD for Christmas....maybe, I don't know yet. But I decided to back the photos up yet again.... this time on the 400-gigabyte internal hard drive on the new computer.
So now...I have DVDs, external hard drive, and internal hard drive. I have about 70,000 photos in 3 locations. Just in case.
If I were you, I'd consider doing the same. At least back up the files you think are important.... any documents you keep on your computer.
Now...I just have to learn this Vista thing.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
