Well the fact you are
reading this gives a glimmer of hope that I am indeed back online and my
computer is functioning once more.
However, a week ago it was a different story.
The desktop PC that I use is
nearly five years old, and, as everyone knows, time takes its toll on the
humble computer in that for some reason the length of time taken to boot the
device takes longer and longer. I am not
100% sure why this is, but it presumably has to do with the weight of the
updates it has to cope with. It had got
to the point where I had to wait at least fifteen minutes from switching on
until I could use my PC, and, this was beginning to grate on me. It just so happened that I was talking about
the problem to a friend in the pub, and, he mentioned about defragging the hard
drive in an attempt to speed the boot time up.
Armed with this knowledge I defragged the hard drive, and, the process
seemed to go very well.
It was not until a couple of
days later when I switched on the computer that alarm bells started to
ring. The windows logo appeared as
normal, but that was as far as it went, and, to make things worse, after a few
minutes the hard disk activity light tailed off, and, hardly registered,
indicating that programs were no longer being loaded. I now know that this is known as “the blue
screen of death” (BSOD). The first time
it happened, after about fifteen minutes I just rebooted, and, thought nothing
of it, however, after a few times the horror set in. The worst issue was the loss of the data. I’m not proud, but unfortunately I was not in
the habit of backing my data up. In
addition I do some work for a local club, and, reconstituting this information
was filling me with dread at the length of time it would take.
My first thought was to turn
to my windows installation DVD. The
computer booted up from the CD ROM, and, I was greeted with the message that
windows had not closed down properly, and, the software would seek to rectify
this position. I was given a glimmer of
hope. Unfortunately it was just a
glimmer. After several agonising hours
my windows installation reported the problem could not be fixed, and, that a
previous point to restore back to could not be found. Clicking on the finish button at this point
just caused the system to close down. My
heart sank, but I tried not to panic.
Thank goodness for mobile
phones! I couldn’t access the internet
from my PC, but I could from my phone. I
typed in various phrases about the problems I was having, and, eventually
learnt about starting windows in safe mode by pressing the F8 key when the
system was starting up. I did this on my
PC, and, after a tense few minutes the system started up in safe mode, much to
my relief. The first thing I checked was
that all the data was still their, and, it was.
At this point I transferred all my data files on to a 32GB USB pen
drive. You cannot imagine how relieved I
felt. I had read that in some instances
booting up in safe mode had the effect of resetting the files on the computer,
which meant that windows would then boot up normally. Unfortunately this didn’t work in my case and
I just encountered the BSOD again, however, I could still boot up in safe mode
with networking which also allowed access to the internet.
Even though I had managed
now to back up all my data, I was still keen to try and avoid a full
installation of windows, and, having to re-install all of my programs. I read on the internet about booting from the
DVD in compatibility mode to fool the system into thinking it was doing an
upgrade. In order to perform this you
had to put the DVD in the CD ROM drive holding down the shift key, which
prevented the automatic running of a program.
You then had to right click on the setup icon through the file explorer
and run in compatibility mode. This initially
seemed to offer some hope, which was dashed when it turned out that
compatibility mode would not run in safe mode (which I was still being forced
to use).
I finally had to come to terms
with the fact the only way I was going to get windows working again, was to do
a full re-install, which I presumed would wipe the hard disk of all programs
and data. The time had come to bite the
bullet. I inserted the windows DVD and
clicked install now. The CD drive hummed
into life and away we went.
A few hours’ later windows
had been installed, and, here is what I found.
All the programs and data (my documents etc.) in the windows directory
had been removed. However, a directory
had been created called windows.old.
This contained all my program files, etc. The program files could not be used, but
hidden within this directory were the data files in the documents and settings
folder, but, in order to see these in the file browser you had to enable it to
show hidden files and directories. Why
this was the case is simply beyond me, as this directory is probably the most
valuable, and, in the first instance it is hidden?
One of the big surprises
turned out to be that where I had created a directory on the Local disk (C:),
this had remained intact along with all the files within. So as I mentioned earlier I did some work for
a local club, and, all the files for this were in the club directory on the C:
drive, which had remained intact. In
theory in safe mode I could have just dropped all the files into a backup
directory that I had created. This was
especially relevant to some backup data application files I had that were
greater in size than 4GB, which the system wouldn’t allow me to copy onto the
USB pen as they were above the limit the system could cope with.
The other interesting area
related to the Google chrome web browser.
Microsoft Internet explorer lost all my bookmarks and saved passwords,
however, when I downloaded Chrome, the installation remembered all my bookmarks
and passwords, which was great bonus.
I am currently in the
process of re-installing all my applications either from CD’s or downloads via
the internet. The sad thing at the
moment is that I cannot find my copy of Microsoft Office, which is one of the programs
I use a lot! If you take one thing away
from this blog, remember to keep all your original program/driver CD’s in one
place so that if the worst does happen, at least you have all your disks in one
place.
The other issue I
encountered was the time it takes.
Computers may assist in the speeding up of processes, but my goodness
that is one week of my life I shall never get back.
Oh and one final point, my
computer now boots up a lot faster, but, if you ever defrag, for goodness sake
back everything up.
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