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.
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