Crash and Burn

For at least a week our main desktop computer has had serious problems. I haven’t tried seriously to find the cause until tonight. Also, for months now, I have wanted to get a special external portable hard drive to back up all my digital photos. I can’t afford to loose those. Digital cameras bring up a whole new set of problems. I finally bought the backup hard drive last night. I paid too much, but that’s another story. I was getting ready to use it on the disabled computer when I realized that the computer worked so bad I would have to fix it before I did anything else. I looked at this and that and made very slow progress because the system would hang up severely and I would have to wait a long time to regain control. The normal ctrl alt del did nothing. Nothing was sucking memory, using the processor, and the HD had plenty of space. I tried to run check disk, but it said it could not run. I tried a bad sector scan with the same results. What a useless error message. I tried to look at the system logs several times, but every time I tried the system was so slow I would get distracted and forget what I was doing. I mean seriously slow. I would bowl almost a full game on the Wii while waiting. I finally accessed the system logs and there were errors galore. The hard drive is failing. It has bad sectors everywhere.

Never put off backing up important stuff. Especially pictures. One HD crash can destroy all your memories just like a fire. I have portions backed up here and there. I think I have everything except the very latest on our old Dell computer and most of the latest is on my laptop. As I type my laptop is pulling files off the junk HD. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. The computer is useless to access with the keyboard and mouse, but I seem to be having pretty good luck over my network. If I manage to get all the stuff off the computer I think is important I just need to get what the kids need before I scuttle the drive. I’m not trying to rejuvenate it. It’s not worth the risk.

I have only had two HD’s fail in the past 20 years and both were in the past year. That’s very strange. On top of that I purchased a 2Gig SD card yesterday and it was defective from the start. I got another today and it seems to be okay. The last HD I had that failed was a Western Digital. I’m not sure what this one is. The backup drive I bought yesterday is a Western Digital as well. I think they have a pretty good reputation. I am hoping these events are just a fluke.

I better sign off and let my computer complete its file copying.