Every few weekends I seem to have a major computer, web site, or connectivity problem. Always on the weekends. I also seem to have more then the average number of hard drive failures.
When I came back from Chicago, my router wouldn't work. I could connect to the Internet when connecting straight to the cable modem, just never through the router. Eventually ,I concluded the router was broken. Today I started up my computer to find, well, that it wouldn't start up.
I actually have two computers: the first one and the second one. When the firts computer receives upgrades, the second computer gets the leftovers, for the most part.
My first computer has two hard drives: the main drive and the backup. I've had hard drive failures before, so I started manually copying files over to that backup drive every month or two. Not the most efficient backup method, but it seemed a reasonable option.
When troubled computer gave me an error message. From what I could tell, that error indicated I had one of three possible causes. Either my RAM was bad, I recently installed bad hardware, or the NTFS file system was screwy. I connected the main drive to the second computer and although it was recognized, the second computer though that drive was blank. This and a few other tests led me to believe that maybe the drive was dead.
I went and bought a new router and hard drive. I started installing software on the new main drive and soon my first computer was up and running. I had been resolving myself to losing a month or two of projects and updates over the past few hours, but when I hooked up the backup drive I learned that it, too, had the very same error that the main drive had.
Perhaps I've lost everything.
Well, not the handful of docs on my Palm, my live Web site, or a couple-dozen items that were on my portable drive, but everything else. E-mails, logos, scans, logs, snapshots, spreadsheets, countless layered photoshop images, web site tests, and all sorts of things that were important to me. I have to find some local computer guys who can help me try to recover these drives.
It's very depressing.
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Jonathan commented at 11:21 PM on September 23, 2004:
Both can't have crashed... was it a virus? If so, remember this the next time you load Windoze on your "cheaper" machine.
(A JPEG vulnerability? A JPEG vulnerability? But I digress...)
Sorry about your woes. If you didn't get a viral infection, then you have to be able to save some data off those drives.
Hurm Partners