February 2009 Archives

I've had a week of computer problems that I tried to ignore during the week but the drain on performance was obvious.

Early in the week I had the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) that went away after a reboot. The first signs of a problem.

Last Sunday night when my backup started it returned an error saying it couldn't read the data folder... another sign of trouble looming. I discovered there was a bad sector on the partition I used to store all my personal data. That particular 320 GB disk was split up into 4 partitions: a Vista install, my Documents, my websites and technical stuff, and all the TV shows I'd downloaded.

I've got 2 × 1 TB external drives that I back up to, so I copied over all the TV shows, and already had backups of the other 3 partitions. I deleted the faulty partition and re-routed some of the links, copying all my data back to the original My Documents location and pointing the links to the new location. That helped with the speed of the computer and things looked like they were back to normal.

I could boot into Vista, but because it too was looking for the corrupted data drive, it hung and did nothing, and was totally useless.

Yesterday I removed the drive from the computer, then I couldn't boot into XP because of the boot loader that Vista uses. I put the drive back in the computer but it didn't fix the problem. I used a couple of utilities off the Hiren's Boot Disk and managed after 4 frustrating hours to finally boot into XP. From there I was able to delete the boot manager files (renamed them actually because they're impossible to delete) and now the computer boots up normally again.

Previously I had 3 hard drives in the computer. The added the 3rd hard drive and it hung on boot again and wouldn't do anything, so at the moment I have just the one hard drive in the box, and the 2 external drives. The 2nd hard drive has a backup of my xp install, and all the software I've downloaded for the last couple of years, something I don't want to lost, but something I can't access at the moment.

I haven't given up, there has to be a way to get everything working again, though the 320 gb disk is probably as Bob says. I can live without it.

As usual, I've had a very busy few weeks. On Monday I took Dad to Tumut to the Aged hostel there where he'll stay until a spot comes up either here in Junee or in Wagga. The place is lovely and Dad was okay about going there. We drove through Gundagai and the smoke from the Victorian bush fires was so thick you couldn't see the hills around Gundagai. It was eerie.

Tuesday night Dad rang to say he didn't like it and I was a bit taken aback, though he said the same about Junee Hospital when he first went there so I'm hoping that as he settles in, his attitude will change. Alex and I are going to Tumut tomorrow to visit.

Carly is packing all her clothes for a move to Wagga! Lauren is going to move both boys into the bigger bedroom and give Carly the smaller room, so she won't have the problem of getting to work each day. Today, for instance, she didn't start work until 2pm, but had to get the bus at 7.30am because the bus company cut out the Friday run at 10.30am, and the 1.20pm train is too unreliable to count on getting to work on time.

I'm going to miss Carly when she finally leaves. She's a great help around the house, the one who cleans up the mess that Alex leaves. He's a shocker! You can tell exactly where he's been by the trail he leaves. Yesterday when I got home from work it wasn't too hard to work out that he'd been working on his bike in the lounge-room. Tools everywhere! The school left where it was dropped. Clothes flung on the lounge, empty cups on the coffee table. It's about time I started training him to clean up after himself.

Happy Valentine's day for tomorrow, and Daniel, happy birthday.