digibutter.nerr

[Francis]

Chapter 1 : Storm Approaching
It started off as a nice summer day. Bird chirping, sun shining, not a care in the world. But dark clouds were quickly rolling in from a distance. A gloomy foreshadowing of what was to come...

The sky went dark as the winds began to howl. Rain begain to pour, accompanied by pounding thunder. But soon the rain drops were drowned out by a strange pitter-patter. Hail. That's right, hail at the beginning of summer in Hot-lanta. Tornados warnings flashed up on TV as the thunder got louder. Then ZAP!, the power flickered off for second. I, sitting at my computer as usual, unplugged my PC as it began to reboot, to keep it from getting fried if lightening struck. But it never did, the storm quickly passed, and I went about my day...

A few days later, I decide to boot it up to work on some cool new features for digibutter. Windows XP starts up, but then suddenly freezes, except I can still move my mouse cursor around. "How strange" I thought to myself. "Maybe the case shorted out, since I had to move it around". (My computer will somtimes shut off if I bump it, because the motherboard touches metal)

I press the power button, but nothing happens. No whirring of fans, no beeps, no clacks... nothing. I open the case, and see it tries to start for a second, but then immedately stops. "Oh great, just how I wanted to spend my weekend".

I'm pretty sure it is the power supply, so I put my desktop in the trunk of my car, and head off to the computer parts store. I buy a new power supply, and plug it up to my PC while still in the store. The sound of whirring fans and a spinning hard drive was music to my ears. I head home thinking all my troubles were over. Little did I know that they were just beginning...

Chapter 2 : Now entering Sector FAIL
I get home, finish installing the new power supply, get everything back into it's rightful place, and get ready for a solid day of digi-hacking. Windows boots up just fine. I go to my start menu and... no response. I try clicking on a desktop icon... nothing. Ctrl-Alt-Del?... nope. I notice the hard drive light is on... it must be doing something. I give it a few minutes, but it doesnt appear to be doing anything, so I shut it off. That would be the last time I ever see my desktop background.

I power up again, but this time, Windows doesnt start. I compains about not being able to find C:/Windows/system32/config. Uh-Oh, I'm pretty sure that's important. It suggests I use the recover tool on the Windows XP CD. So I pop it in, reboot with the CD, loads the recovery console, and I run CHKDSK. It tells me there are "unrecoverable problems". Double Uh-Oh.

I immedately google search for hard disk fixes and data recovery tools. I see that there are two tools generally recommended, SpinRite and GetDataBack. SpinRite claims to actually try to "fix" your disk errors, making everything good as new. But, this could take a really long time if there are lots of errors, like days or even weeks, and may never even work. So I decided to go with GetDataBack which... um... gets your data back.

Chapter 3 : Disko Fever
I took my harddrive out of my PC, and put it in a USB enclosure (making my internal harddrive an external harddrive). If the harddrive still mechanically functions, GetDataBack can scan it and let you copy the files off of it. It can even find files that you "deleted" but still exist on disk. It can also create an image of the disk, so you don't have to keep reading off the failing hard drive. The more you use a failing hard-drive, the worse it gets. So I created a .img of my 160GB hard drive, putting it onto another external hard-drive that had room for it.

From what I can tell, GetDataBack appears to be able to see all my files! So I pay $80 for the license key and start copying. At least I know my data (most of it anyways) is safe. I put my error'd hard drive back into my PC and run SeaTools in hopes that I could fix the errors. But SeaTools reports hundreds of errors... so yeah, it's a gonner.

Conclusion
I am sorting though my files, trying to get up and running again on my laptop. Hopefully I can do some stuff tomorrow. I havn't been able to work on any new features like I intended to and my three-day weekend has been shot.
This a choose-your-own-moral-of-this-story adventure:
1) Don't ever turn your computer off!
2) You must recover!
3) Backup, backup, backup!
4) Beware the Ides+5 of May
5) Recover your own data, don't pay a company hundreds to do it.
6) Not all software has a free alternative, sometimes it is OK to pay.

[Lord Bob]

Ouch...
So no nametags dammit?

[Goron Mask]

Ouch...that sucks. I don't really know what to say except good luck with your computer troubles.

[Fancy Wario]

[Strong Bad]

[Miku Hatsune]

Can't you just restock nametags?

[Ligador]

You could've gotten your Meowmaid to do the trick. *Shot*

Either way, that's too bad. Are there more stuff you can't do anymore for this while?
_________________
My siggy is original.

[Shrowser]