Strange things have been happening with my main work computer. The first sign of trouble with the Windows XP machine was when I became suspicious of louder than normal seeking noises from the hard drive and ran a CHKDSK on it a few weeks ago. The scan found a corrupted file which it proceeded to "repair," resulting in all the dates in my Palm calendar disappearing. Fortunately I synch with the Palm fairly often, so I reinstalled the Palm Desktop and synched back 99% of my schedule.
Then a few days ago Eudora froze while going through email and while trying to shut it down, XP crashed completely. When I rebooted, the computer would get to a point in the boot cycle and fail, going into endless rebooting loops. Oh-oh!
I used the XP install disc to boot into the Recovery Console and ran CHKDSK with the /R (repair) parameter. Once it finished, the computer booted OK, but very slowly. It also appears there are problems with the sound driver and that USB 2.0 ports have dropped to USB 1.1 speeds.
I backed up the hard drive and have been using the machine for a couple of days, but am worried about its flaky condition. While the HD is no longer chattering, I get the sense that it is likely going south, and perhaps there are issues with the motherboard as well, so it appears shopping for a new computer may be in order. In the meantime, I'm backing up My Documents and my email daily to a second internal hard drive, and every couple of days to an external drive as well.
Technology is great, but it also sucks when it takes up hours of your time fixing it. I wonder how many hours I've put in over the years replacing defunct hard drives and reinstalling software and restoring data? I've dealt with toasted hard drives at least three or four times for our own machines, and twice for family members.
So remember, it's not IF your hard drive will die some day, it's WHEN it will die. Some people are lucky and go years and years without encountering such problems, but my experience indicates that after three to five years of intensive use, HDs start developing Alzheimer's. Multiply that over four or five computers in our house/office and that's a major meltdown once every year or so.
Backup, backup, backup!
Posted by Paul at April 3, 2008 10:41 PM