- Joined
- Feb 22, 2015
- Messages
- 1,393
It's everyone's worst fear - total loss of a hard drive. Black screen of death.
Some background - I am on a computer I built in 2006. Yeah, Windoze XP.... But, love the damn thing. It's been a solid and 100 percent reliable, tough SOB. I've refused to "upgrade" and still do. I bitterly cling to my WinXP.
And of course like everyone else, my entire digital life is on it. And not just my leisure life - I do professional digital audio production. I have a in-home recording studio and I can do anything from session demos to full blown produced albums, radio spots, live remote recordings, create 100 percent computer generated music, everything. I use Samplitude.
Anyhow there I was Tuesday morning, firing up the system again like the thousands of times before - I turn it on as part of the drowsy morning routine, hit the switch then hit the beer fridge for a ice cold Dr. Pepper to take with me to the home theater to watch news and get woke up... Then usually later I go into the studio to start my digital day.
Well, Tuesday I walked in there and my screens were black, with only one little message on them:
There was nothing to do but shut it off and restart it, manually. Which, I did. And with the same result.
So the third time I restarted it, I hit F8 to see if it would let me choose the other hard drive to boot to, and yes it did. But shockingly - it didn't even know of the existence of the primary drive. It now thinks there is only one drive.
So, I shut it down again and opened the box up and checked all the connections. Everything was fine.
I put it all back together and fired it up again, hitting F8 so I could get it to boot to my other drive, and all was success - except this drive was not one I ever used much. All the important stuff was on the drive the computer now doesn't think, exists. I even tried to find it in the system, nothing. Like it's not even there.
In the BIOS it did show the existence of that drive, but now had it labelled as a unidentified removable storage device and had it listed as disabled with no option to enable. The sucker is just, dead.
SO.... I took this computer to my workbench and fired it up with the covers off, to see what's going on. The "dead" hard drive wasn't even spinning up, it was just humming and generating ALOT of heat - it had become essentially, a hot plate.
Hoping against hope, I called a friend who owns a computer repair store and who's been into computers since he was eight, and gave him my list of laments. He said it didn't sound promising, but he said he could do data recovery for me even if it meant sending this dead drive away, for the procedure.
So, I took this puppy in to his shop where we discussed how I would still wind up with Windows XP. No problem there. BUT...
I saw on his counter something I'd been reading about but had forgotten - Solid State Hard Drives. No discs, no motors, no moving parts at all. 150GB for 50 bucks. Can I use this with XP, I asked.
You bet, was the answer. And XP loves these. I use them and XP on all my shop computers here, fastest computers on the planet, he said.
So, here I am with my old/new computer already home and installed, with the SSHD kicking it, and data recovery in progress for my old hard drive - he stuck it in his deep freeze and froze it and was able to get it running for the time needed to recover all the data.
Ok, early review of the SSHD - wonderful. I have never seen a computer boot up this fast. But then after the bootup, it also operates greasy fast. Everything happens NOW with it... Everything runs blazingly fast, every program without exception. Even processor intensive ones like video editing and audio production, run faster now.
So, two days in and so far I am very happy and with my data coming home soon, I call it a WIN and a scary, sad and bad bad story with a silver lining. And if you've really read all this and come this far, my hat is off to you.
Anyone else have a similar horror story to share?
Some background - I am on a computer I built in 2006. Yeah, Windoze XP.... But, love the damn thing. It's been a solid and 100 percent reliable, tough SOB. I've refused to "upgrade" and still do. I bitterly cling to my WinXP.
And of course like everyone else, my entire digital life is on it. And not just my leisure life - I do professional digital audio production. I have a in-home recording studio and I can do anything from session demos to full blown produced albums, radio spots, live remote recordings, create 100 percent computer generated music, everything. I use Samplitude.
Anyhow there I was Tuesday morning, firing up the system again like the thousands of times before - I turn it on as part of the drowsy morning routine, hit the switch then hit the beer fridge for a ice cold Dr. Pepper to take with me to the home theater to watch news and get woke up... Then usually later I go into the studio to start my digital day.
Well, Tuesday I walked in there and my screens were black, with only one little message on them:
Please choose a valid boot device.
There was nothing to do but shut it off and restart it, manually. Which, I did. And with the same result.
So the third time I restarted it, I hit F8 to see if it would let me choose the other hard drive to boot to, and yes it did. But shockingly - it didn't even know of the existence of the primary drive. It now thinks there is only one drive.
So, I shut it down again and opened the box up and checked all the connections. Everything was fine.
I put it all back together and fired it up again, hitting F8 so I could get it to boot to my other drive, and all was success - except this drive was not one I ever used much. All the important stuff was on the drive the computer now doesn't think, exists. I even tried to find it in the system, nothing. Like it's not even there.
In the BIOS it did show the existence of that drive, but now had it labelled as a unidentified removable storage device and had it listed as disabled with no option to enable. The sucker is just, dead.
SO.... I took this computer to my workbench and fired it up with the covers off, to see what's going on. The "dead" hard drive wasn't even spinning up, it was just humming and generating ALOT of heat - it had become essentially, a hot plate.
Hoping against hope, I called a friend who owns a computer repair store and who's been into computers since he was eight, and gave him my list of laments. He said it didn't sound promising, but he said he could do data recovery for me even if it meant sending this dead drive away, for the procedure.
So, I took this puppy in to his shop where we discussed how I would still wind up with Windows XP. No problem there. BUT...
I saw on his counter something I'd been reading about but had forgotten - Solid State Hard Drives. No discs, no motors, no moving parts at all. 150GB for 50 bucks. Can I use this with XP, I asked.
You bet, was the answer. And XP loves these. I use them and XP on all my shop computers here, fastest computers on the planet, he said.
So, here I am with my old/new computer already home and installed, with the SSHD kicking it, and data recovery in progress for my old hard drive - he stuck it in his deep freeze and froze it and was able to get it running for the time needed to recover all the data.
Ok, early review of the SSHD - wonderful. I have never seen a computer boot up this fast. But then after the bootup, it also operates greasy fast. Everything happens NOW with it... Everything runs blazingly fast, every program without exception. Even processor intensive ones like video editing and audio production, run faster now.
So, two days in and so far I am very happy and with my data coming home soon, I call it a WIN and a scary, sad and bad bad story with a silver lining. And if you've really read all this and come this far, my hat is off to you.
Anyone else have a similar horror story to share?
