It's a darke day for us here on the interwebs. My Dell Xps M1710 decided that 2 years of service are quite enough, and with resigned finality, crashed. And that is why, though I have posts waiting for you on my Google Docs, I've been silent for some time. I'm posting this note via the email facility of blogger.
Well, it was not exactly unexpected. I came home one day to find that my hard drive was not recognised by the BIOS. However a quick reset to defaults of the BIOS solved the problem. This of course, made me quite jittery, and the first thind I did was make a backup of my important, irreplaceable files onto my external MyBook.
And it was a good thing I did, as a couple of days back. my laptop restarted and now the hard drive is quite missing. Now, I've not got everything I want off that drive, but I've got enough so that I do not have to commit ritualistic hara-kiri. Of course, I've had hard disks die on me before, the worst being when my 500 Gb external Segate got fried when I connected it to an unprotected power outlet at a friends place in bangalore. A few quick power fluctuations and thats all she wrote.
The stupedest reason for loosing data was way back in undergraduation. Me and a few mates decided to upgrade my Pentium II, 2 gb hdd from Win 95 to 98. So, after copying the stuff I wanted to keep into a folder, we proceeded to wipe everything else and install a pirated copy of 98 which my uncle sent from Singapore. BTW, this kinda activity was the height of excitement for me and my friends those days. And from that you know I live a sad escuse of a life. Anyway, everything was proceeding swimmingly, when the installation hung somewhere towards the end.
A small setback, we figured, and retried the installation with exactly the same results. After several goes, tweaking all possible settings, we had progressed no further. My two friends and I were perplexed and irritated. However this third guy from my class, came forward, and with quiet confidence said that 98 would not install without a full format of the hard disk. We scoffed, but after a few more tries we began to listen to him. He was totally confident and assured us that that was the problem. I really needed the data on my drive, but without an OS it was useless. And in those days of floppy diskettes, no realistic backup solution presented itself.
So, I finally bit the bullet, and typed in format c: . What a sacrifice, but it was the only way to go forward. We ran the installation for the upmteenth time, and lo and behold; it failed in the EXACT same place! At this point the guy quietly removed himself from the proceedings. After some time, my friends left too, admitting defeat. Late in the night however, I came across a setting tucked away in the BIOS which said Enable/Disable Virus Protection. This prevented anything from changing the MBR of the Hard Disk, which windows obviously needed to do. DOH. I disabled it and the installation ran flawlessly.
But I never trusted that guy again.
Well, it was not exactly unexpected. I came home one day to find that my hard drive was not recognised by the BIOS. However a quick reset to defaults of the BIOS solved the problem. This of course, made me quite jittery, and the first thind I did was make a backup of my important, irreplaceable files onto my external MyBook.
And it was a good thing I did, as a couple of days back. my laptop restarted and now the hard drive is quite missing. Now, I've not got everything I want off that drive, but I've got enough so that I do not have to commit ritualistic hara-kiri. Of course, I've had hard disks die on me before, the worst being when my 500 Gb external Segate got fried when I connected it to an unprotected power outlet at a friends place in bangalore. A few quick power fluctuations and thats all she wrote.
The stupedest reason for loosing data was way back in undergraduation. Me and a few mates decided to upgrade my Pentium II, 2 gb hdd from Win 95 to 98. So, after copying the stuff I wanted to keep into a folder, we proceeded to wipe everything else and install a pirated copy of 98 which my uncle sent from Singapore. BTW, this kinda activity was the height of excitement for me and my friends those days. And from that you know I live a sad escuse of a life. Anyway, everything was proceeding swimmingly, when the installation hung somewhere towards the end.
A small setback, we figured, and retried the installation with exactly the same results. After several goes, tweaking all possible settings, we had progressed no further. My two friends and I were perplexed and irritated. However this third guy from my class, came forward, and with quiet confidence said that 98 would not install without a full format of the hard disk. We scoffed, but after a few more tries we began to listen to him. He was totally confident and assured us that that was the problem. I really needed the data on my drive, but without an OS it was useless. And in those days of floppy diskettes, no realistic backup solution presented itself.
So, I finally bit the bullet, and typed in format c: . What a sacrifice, but it was the only way to go forward. We ran the installation for the upmteenth time, and lo and behold; it failed in the EXACT same place! At this point the guy quietly removed himself from the proceedings. After some time, my friends left too, admitting defeat. Late in the night however, I came across a setting tucked away in the BIOS which said Enable/Disable Virus Protection. This prevented anything from changing the MBR of the Hard Disk, which windows obviously needed to do. DOH. I disabled it and the installation ran flawlessly.
But I never trusted that guy again.
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