My "play" computer crashed this afternoon -- I got the dreaded blue screen of death announcing an"Unmountable boot volume" error. This stupid Dell did not come with a copy of Windows XP, which I might have been able to use to get it up and running again, so I'm pretty much dead in the water right now. I don't know how fixable it is; I just know I can't fix it. This is the computer I was planning to replace at the end of the month, anyway, so the machine itself is no big loss. What concerns me most are the files on its hard drive which, of course, have not been backed up recently -- my writing, my pictures, all my email addresses.
Wednesday, I'm going to take it in to Best Buy and let a Geek Squad guy take a look at it to see how fixable it is, and if so, what it would cost to fix it. If it's over $50-60 bucks, I'll just do without until I get my new one. If it can't be fixed, I'll see if they can recover my important files off the hard disk. Of course, that's the computer that has my feed reader on it which has all the blogs I read and the web comics I follow. So if you don't see comments from me, that's why. The feed reader is a Firefox gadget, and I can't put Firefox on my work computer because it is incompatible with the programs I need to do my job.
I think when I get the new computer, I'll see what kind of external automatic backup gizmos are available, and what kind of money that entails.
So, anyway, I'm practically incommunicado right now.
Oh dear, that is bad news indeed.
ReplyDeleteIf you are lucky it might just be that the registry has got screwed up or something similar and that the situation can be recovered. Let's hope so. If not, the Clever Squad should be able to get stuff off the hard disc, assuming that this hasn't crashed. Fingers crossed on all fronts.
In terms of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, may I suggest you invest in at least one external disc drive for backups? Some people use storage sites on the Web but I personally feel uncomfortable at giving my private files to third parties to look after.
Seagate and similar companies make drives that work out of the box when you plug them into the USB socket. I currently have two though I think that three with a regime of mutual backups is better. If one of these drives or the PC's hard drive failed, I would still have all my files. This also guards against you deleting files in error, assuming you keep your backups up to date.
I have very little data on my PC. If I bought a new one, I would only need to install a few applications to be up and running as before.
A good computer man will rescue everything on the hard drive before he starts trying to fix it/replace stuff. It can be done, so don't let anyone near it unless this is a given.
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