After a gallant return home from a great weekend I sat down last night and turned on the computer. I tried to connect to the internet, but it wasn't happening. Nothing new there. I decided I'd talk to the internet people in the morning to see if we could figure out just what the hell I'm paying for. I then decided to download the weekend's photos to the computer from the camera.
The process went well enough. All the photos were copied and deleted from the camera. Then I made the catastrophic mistake of trying to see the photos I'd taken. As soon as I'd opened the My Pictures folder, the hard drive went into a busy crash and started ticking, like it was trying to catch a foothold on something that wasn't there. I let this go on for a minute, then got bored and shut down the computer manually. After letting the poor dear rest for a minute I started it back up.
The boot went normally enough, but then, a moment later and before Windows could start, I got "Hard Disk Failure. Press Ctl+Alt+Del to restart." Fine, did that. Same message. So I popped in the Windows Install disk and ran Chkdsk, which ran for about 18 hours, the hard drive making all kinds of funny noises, until I got tired of it and stopped it this morning. I'm now in the fourth hour of trying to reinstall Windows without formatting, in the probably vain hope that I'll be able to recover the photos I'd taken before I format the damn thing again and try to buy another week out of a hard drive that (and I know this for sure now) has had it.
It was a great weekend and the medical check-up showed that I'm still healthy as can be. I'm just in no mood to write about any more than that. I'm sure you understand. More from the internet club in the days ahead.
Posted by Rob at June 6, 2005 03:27 PM