09
Jul
My computer works again!
Thursday night I was playing chess with Peter when I heard a clunk-clunk from the hard drive. Then my computer was frozen. I copied down the state of the chess board and tried rebooting which the computer informed me was impossible becasuee it was an unmountable drive.
I tried booting into the Window recovery console, but that told me that I had no hard drives in my system. I figured I was going to be buying and installing another hard drive. I tried different controllers, and different cables to see if that would help but no change.
Finally I was resolved to trying to salvage data and get a new hard drive so I plugged it in as a slave on Nicole’s computer. That managed to boot after trying chkdsk and failing with something like: Unspecified disk error. That’s good for confidence building. I set it for the thorough fixing and had it reboot into that and after about an hour it repaired the file system! I lost all my bookmarks, but I had a recent enough copy that I was able to restore. Yay!