Computer Problems = Annoying
November 1st, 2004 | by xxdesmus |Well, about 10 minutes after my post last night I restarted my computer because it had been on for about 6 days. It shutdown normally, then it started to reboot. I went upstairs to start some tea. When I came back downstairs I found a strange black screen and the wonderful message “Disk Read Error, Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to reboot.” So I assumed this was just a fluke error so I pushed Ctrl+Alt+Delete only to eventually be confronted with the exact same message. It turns out my primary hard drive had just officially died.
It a very strange coicidence I had actually just backed up my system about 4 hours before this. Had I not had the strange preminition to update my backup I would have been forced to use a backup that was about a month old. This doesn’t sound like a major problem for the normal user, but for me a lot has changed in a month’s usage. Anyways, so I had to crack open the computer case (not literally) switch the jumper settings for the 2 internal hard drives (master to slave for the dead one, and slave to master for the other internal one). Then the long and tedious process of ghosting the backup onto the other internal hard drive. So here I am, good as new, well sorta. I am running Windows XP off of my other hard drive and I am in the process of trying to determine if the other hard drive trully is dead or just having some weird heart attack.
The plan was to format and reinstall everything over Thanksgiving break pending a onslaught of work. I think I may be a bit adventurous and install Windows Media Center (MCE) 2005 on one parition and Windows Longhorn (Build 4074) on another partition. It’s been killing me seeing all the cool things that are possible with DCM, Desktop Content Manager, formally DCE, Desktop Content Environment…So that’s the plan.