Ok, it was just my computer, but I still feel kind of proud. First the background story. A while ago, one fine, sunny day, I turned on my computer and it refused to boot. Now, I do have this belief that I’m not too bad with computers, but when I was suddenly presented with a BIOS screen that told me it couldn’t find my harddisk, I had to admit I felt quite helpless. To make matters worse, I was at that time on what I consider to be the wrong side of the Atlantic, and supposed to be enjoying myself, but I could only think about how it would be hopeless to get help with my computer before I got home, and I really wanted to know whether my hard disk was completely fried.

Well, I survived a week of agony before getting home, and found out that I should take a look at the hard drive before doing anything. That turned out to be a good idea, because it had actually physically fallen out of place, meaning that it was not connected to the computer. Well, I thought, this explains it all, I put the drive back in place and hoped that all would be well. I turned on the computer again, same result. It could now find the drive, but the Windows installation had obviously been damaged. At this point I felt quite frustrated and was almost ready to give up hope of getting my files back.

However, after talking to Google and some other friends I found out that I should try to boot the computer from a CD. I found a Linux distribution (Ubuntu), and was reassured by the fact that you could boot it from a CD without installing (which would have meant partitioning the hard drive, not really what I wanted), and that it could read my external hard drive without problems, which gave me a place to store the files I was trying to resque.

Now, imagine the irony of fate, the first real problem I encounter is the lack of a CD! Really, I turned our house upside down, but to no avail. It was a Sunday, so I could not buy one, and I really didn’t want to wait until Monday, having come thus far. Luckily, I found a nice neighbour with an empty CD, and behold, Ubuntu not only managed to boot my previously braindead computer, but retrieved all the files without a problem! After copying my files to the external drive, I found this recovery program on the computer and made it return to the states it was in when I bought it. Ok, I lost a few programs and settings, but that is nothing compared to all the personal files I managed to resque, and my computer even runs faster now, because it was set back about four years.

So, what have I learnt from this? Well, firstly, I need to back up my files. I had some backups, but I quickly found that they were not complete or recent enough, and things could easily have been a lot worse. I encourage you all to think through what you would do if your hard disk suddenly failed, it could happen sooner than you think. Secondly, I learned that computes are almost never really broken, there is always some hope. Last, but not least, computer people are right, Windows is really not that good, and I owe Ubuntu a huge thanks for saving my files when Windows threw a fit because of a few missing files. Thank you!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 11:24 pm and is filed under My life, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.