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After my recent article
defending computers from the lies people tell about them, it came as quite
a shock when my own computer turned on me. I suppose I shouldn’t have
been surprised, after all I believe and have stated on more than one
occasion that computers are equal opportunity crashers. No matter who you
are or what your station in life, your computer can rise up and bite you
in the behind.
At least that’s the way
I felt about 3:00pm this past Monday, when I realized that the trusty hard
drive on my desktop computer was beginning a full scale meltdown. It
started rather innocently as I prepared to install and upgrade to
Quickbooks. I had checked all of my email and after sending out several
replies, I closed down Outlook and began to do some basic clean up on my
computer by deleted some older programs and files. As I began to move some
data from my hard drive to my fileserver, during the copy process my
computer locked up.
I didn’t think too much
about it as I pushed the power button to reboot, after all, I hadn’t
rebooted in several days and if you’ve had any experience with
Windows then you are aware of the fact that every few days a reboot is
good for the computer’s soul and it’s health. So, once the reboot was
complete, I started the copy process over again. After a few minutes, the
computer locked up again. Time to reboot and time to try again. Again,
after a few minutes, lock up. Now it was time to get serious. Was it a
virus? Was it a damaged file? Was it a bad spot on the hard drive?
After this reboot, I
decided that a virus scan was in order. I connected to the Internet and
updated my AVG anti-virus software to the latest virus definitions and
began the scan. 20 minutes later, the virus scan was completed with no
viruses found. I then began a Scandisk to check the drive for bad spots or
damaged file directories. After another thirty minutes, I determined that
there were no bad spots. I tried one more copy process, but this time more
focused. I made a list in my head of the most vital files and began to
copy them just a few at a time. The files moved easily for about 10
minutes and suddenly the computer locked up again.
More reboots and more
files copied and less than three hours after starting to have
difficulties, I accepted the fact that the meltdown was in full process. I
turned the computer off and carried it to the shop and put it on the
bench. Hank tried his hand at copying an image of the drive to another
drive. We left the process running and went home. On Tuesday morning, I
came into the shop only to learn that the imaging pocess we had left
running had failed. A second attempt also failed.
As a final option, I had
Hank format a new drive and install Windows from scratch. We added a
hot-swappable hard drive bay to my computer and installed the failing
drive as a secondary drive in my computer. Over the remainder of Tuesday
and good part of Wednesday I copied critical files from the bad drive to
the new drive. I restored from various backups what I could. We had a
major success on Tuesday evening when we were able to recover my very
large email file with over six months worth of emails stored there. My
email address book was saved as well as many of the miscellaneous files
stored on my old hard drive. I was fortunate that most of the files that I
use are stored on our fileservers, which limited my potential loss.
During the experience I
thought many times about my most recent article, “In
Defense of Computers.” I did have to tell two clients that I was
suffering from computer problems and postponed some work until I had the
system back up and working stable. I first thought my computer was working
against me, and I was bitter about my computer’s apparent betrayal.
However, as the crisis passed, I realized that I had no one to blame but
myself. I had not kept up with my backups as diligently as I should have.
The hard drive I was using was over four years old and as with any moving
part, hard drives DO eventually wear out. It’s not a question of whether
a hard drive will fail; it is a question of when. Computers have gotten
more dependable, but with that dependability often comes a false sense of
security. That false sense of security makes it easy to assume that since
your computer has always worked perfectly, it will always work perfectly.
But you know what happens when you assume anything!
I was lucky. The drive
that failed was not my primary storage device. The few critical files
stored on the computer were recovered and the new drive is working well. I
lost about 20 hours worth of time dealing with the crisis and I’m still
reloading some of the software programs that I use on a regular basis.
Loading a clean version of Windows on the computer even got me about a 20%
improvement in processing speed. All in all, the experience was not a bad
one. I still stand by my original article where I defended computers from
the unfair treatment they receive from users. But with ease of use and
dependability comes a responsibility that users must accept to protect
themselves from failures beyond the computer’s control.
To paraphrase the words
of one of the greatest U.S. Presidents, “Trust your computer, but verify
your data!”
Paul H. Tarver |
