The Day the PC Died
Posted in Geek by CujoOctober 6th, 2006 - 12:6 AM
Well it has happened. Earlier than expected but on October 5th 2006 my PC officially died ending my long tenure in the Windows world. I was keeping the PC running as a secondary test bed for programming to make sure everything looked right on a variety of systems and browsers but this is no more.
I tried loading the PC today to grab some image files I needed off of it for use in my site’s redesign but it would power up to the Windows loading screen then just reboot and continually do this no matter what startup procedure I used. I was freaking out a bit as I still didn’t have an opportunity to back up all the information that was on this hard drive for use on the Mac. I quickly took apart the PC and grabbed the hard drive, I then took apart the external hard drive enclosure I have and plugged the hard drive from my PC into that. Brought this contraption dowstairs and conntected it to the Mac to see if it would work and if the data was accessible.
SUCCESS
The Mac wins again. I was able to recover the data I needed for this short period of time. I’ll be transfering the rest over later this weekend and then backing that up on my other external drive for safe keeping. I might buy an additional drive just for the peace of mind.
I would still like to try to get the PC hard drive working again because having the luxury of testing sites in Windows and mainly the horrible IE (Internet Explorer) is a huge plus. For sore reasons Jes’ XP machine doesn’t load IE — maybe it just senses the evil and nicely stays away from it.
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October 6th, 2006 at 8:00 am
That’s what my computer did about a month ago, but it did it all night long. I turned it off in the morning and when i got home from work, i restarted it (thinking that it would’ve just fixed itself while turned off???!!) Obviously that didn’t work, so i turned it off and literally kicked it. I was getting really mad at my computer. I turned it on to format it and it when through an error checking and then booted up fine.
October 6th, 2006 at 8:40 am
Yeah… I’m sure it’s fixable but I just don’t have the time to go through the process at this moment. It was easier to remove the drive and connect to the Mac and do my work there. The PC has turned into a side project for another day — although the hard drive is sounding rough, it might be on it’s last legs, it is about 5 years old — if not more.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Easy fix dude. Just pop in your Windows disk, startup the recovery console, and run chkdsk (with the /r option). If that doesn’t work, run fixboot, or even fixmbr. Boots up like a dream!!
October 6th, 2006 at 11:42 am
HAHA. Thanks Matt, I also work in IT
Like I stated previously, just no time for what I wanted to do last night for it. It’ll get done, just not now. I’ll have all my data backed up first as well just in case the drive does burn up. It was making some weird noises last night every time it was accessed so I’m assuming it’s about done.
October 6th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Just taking advantage of a chance to make it sound like I know what I’m doing
October 6th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Yeah Mac!
October 7th, 2006 at 1:20 am
Well if your looking for an excuse to get rid of windows this is the perfect chance. But if its an actually a hardware problem like the hard drive going out, well that could be easily fixed. You could go and buy a cheap-o deluxe 40gb Hard drive or whatnot and install linux on it.
Funny thing is, everytime one of my PC’s go down I end up keeping it. I just replace the parts that need fixed, install linux on it and plug em in. So my bedroom always has at least a few PC’s in it running at all time.
October 8th, 2006 at 3:41 am
See, that’s why I’ll never be a computer guy….MY bedroom has naked women in it, not computers……well, ok, maybe not naked women…..but at least pictures of them…..GO PATRIOTS!
October 8th, 2006 at 11:10 am
The naked women are patriots? Well that’s good, I suppose.
October 8th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Tarellel - the computer is basically a mish mash of old computer parts with newer ones added in along the way. So it’s done its job quite nicely until now. When I get some free time and the data off the drive I’ll probably try to fix it or rebuild it. If all else fails a new drive might be in order.
Ross - I don’t believe you.
Anita - he’s weird like that.
October 8th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
At least new hard drives are cheap. Western Digital has one they sell under a generic label, just as good as their name brand ones but without the hither price. It’s the exact same drive. They claiim to be from a different company, but they’re not. I think it’s a WD subsidiary or some such. They’re just maximizing their profits by selling the the cheap folks, too. If you want to go that route, I can send you links.
October 10th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
He just needs to go the route of heaving his crap in the garbage and focusing on what works.