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When things go wrong…
By mhobach | September 2, 2006
Here it is 6:00am on Saturday. I just spent the better part of 12 hours restoring my main computer – my laptop!
My Son says that I am smart, but I maintain that I am just lucky. You be the judge…
Most of the work that I do is done on a computer. I have several computers that I can be found in front of at almost any moment during the day – yes I am one of those computer geeks! Most of my work is done on my laptop, which is now almost 3 years old. I also have desktop machines, including the computer where I do my video editing – this computer has a huge flat panel monitor and hi-res video card, and hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk.
For the last week or so my laptop has been acting up. I have been so busy that I had planned on working on it this weekend to try to make sure something wasn’t going to be lost. I have been doing my incremental backups and also copying my important files and documents to another computer on the network here at home.
Well, on Thursday my laptop rebooted on its own, twice. This, by the way is a good sign that there is a problem! Friday morning it reported that it couldn’t find a boot drive – oh !@#$% !!
I turned the laptop off for about 10 minutes and then turned it back on while I crossed my fingers and toes. It booted, but not without complaining about some Windows thingy that the computer was not shutdown cleanly. Yeah yeah – I let it boot and without launching any applications I proceeded to do a disk check and then a full backup to a network drive. You don’t want to backup a drive that has bad data on it if you can help it.
By 8:00am everything was backed up as planned. What a relief! I now had all of my data saved for installation back onto the computer once I figure out what was going on. The computer seemed to work fine so I left it on while I was gone for the day running errands. I had also determined from the noises the laptop was making that the problem was with the hard disk. I was glad that it appeared that the hard disk was the problem as this is a fairly simple upgrade.
One of my stops was Best Buy to pickup a new hard disk. I picked up a Seagate 80 gig 2.5†drive that had better specs than the 30 gig drive currently in my laptop. It was a tough choice; I could have chosen a 60, 80, 120, or 160 gig drive. I chose the 80 gig drive simply on the cost of the drive. I paid $129.00 and I figured that was enough to spend versus something more expensive, where I would then have to decide to replace the drive or replace the whole laptop.Â
By 6:00pm my laptop was making some really loud noises. You know that a computer this small shouldn’t be able to make noises that loud so something is really wrong! Yep – I couldn’t get it to boot, and what was worse is that I had left my mail client running all day so all of my mail for the day had been downloaded and deleted from the mail server. Sorry if you sent me an Email on Friday September 1st – your mail was somewhere on that now dead hard disk.
I got out the scalpel and started an I.V. – the I.V. was for me! I removed the old hard disk still warm and shaking. I installed the new hard disk and turned on the power. I went into the BIOS and I was so happy to see that it knew about the new hard disk! This is half the battle – you never know how proprietary the hardware is until you need to do a replacement like this.
I inserted the recovery CD and the laptop booted and it asked me if I wanted to restore my installation of Windows XP Pro. I said yes, yes, as fast as you can! It took about 10 minutes to restore the OS to my new hard disk and the laptop rebooted and up popped the Windows banner and the initial setup and registration pages.
I restored my data from the network and everything was great! Almost…
I had to reinstall all of my applications which meant that I needed to find all of my CD’s, serial numbers, etc. Then I needed to wait while Microsoft handed me each and every service pack, update, etc issued since my version of Windows XP Pro was released and installed on my computer. By 3:30am Saturday morning everything was running again and life was great. Oh, with one exception – I was exhausted and went to bed.
After getting a few hours of sleep and checking on the health of my laptop, I can report that everything is running great. With the new hard disk my laptop is much faster and it is running much cooler too. It also helps that I don’t have all of the ‘stuff’ installed that had accumulated over the years.
Life is good and this laptop is good for another 3 years!
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Topics: Personal | 1 Comment »
September 12th, 2006 at 7:17 am
Hey Mike,
Sorry to hear about your nightmare, my desktop’s jus waiting for a new power supply and reconstruction now itself. In the meanwhile my new Sony Vaio FE series is doing the trick. Isn’t it ironic as a career IT Professional that you might spend the greater part of 40 or more hours a week fixing computers in your full-time gig, plus the hours you spend moonlighting (that happens), and you STILL can’t seem to find time to fix your own computer? Nonetheless, I think that Windows incremental backups are great ideas, but an even better idea if you can would be incremental imaging (like with Nero, not sure if Norton Ghost does this). It’s worth the while to have a little cheap computer setup as the “backup image” server for your opertations. These computers have so much storage capacity nowadays that it’s ridiculuous, but also since you’re lucky enough to have a good network setup. Just my opinion. Good luck!
Brandon Hunter