Pooter stuff

Just thought I'd recount a tale for you. My hard disk has been giving some interesting errors of late and packed in on Friday night. Windows XP splash screen would appear, immediately followed by a blue screen followed by a reboot.

No matter I thought - I'll get out my XP boot CD and run the Recovery Console. No dice - even that wouldn't boot.

So I got out my Knoppix CD, booted up and Linux could see the drive no sweat. Even better, after another reboot where I inserted my memory USB stick, it saw that as well and I could recover the family's vital stuff (like my daughter's photos - that kind of really really important stuff).

I bought a new hard disk from PC World (well, needs must when the devil drives) reinstalled XP and put the files back on.

I then put the knackered hard disk into my other PC which has XP on which promptly CHKDSKed the knackered drive to hell and back, making most of the files unrecovereable.

The moral of the story - Knoppix (and any Live CD) is a bloody useful thing to have around the house when this happens, and also don't let XP sort out your hard disk problems - it'll all get a lot, lot worse.

The other moral of the story is that if you're getting hard disk errors, backup and go and buy a new hard disk before it all goes really pants on you.

Colin.

Posted By: colinh, Aug 22, 22:59:12