Jan

Pumping oil

Posted by: Richard in General

The saga of the PC continues.

To those of you who aren’t technically minded, think of my old PC as being an oil tanker.

My tanker went on the rocks, the hull was damaged and the engines were completely smashed.

Is it now a useless tanker?

No. Because the oil is still on board. But the engines are smashed so there is no power to pump the oil off.

What I needed was another ship that could sail up to the taker and using its power, pump the oil off. So I spent the last few days scouring the Internet for software that I could mount onto a CD or DVD that could access my one remaining hard disk.

I found the software/ship that I needed, and my files/oil is at this moment being pumped into a USB hard disk/storage tank.

70,000,000,000 gallons of oil! [or as we say in the ‘puter business – 70Gb of data]

Once the oil is off, I can go about repairing the holes in the hull [repartitioning the faulty hard drive] and installing new engines [new Windows].

Hopefully I’ll end up with an oil tanker in pristine condition.

I didn’t like to admit it before, even to myself, but some of the information on that computer was critical. For some reason, the latest backup had failed, and I hadn’t been aware of the fact until this week. There were a load of personal files [like our French holiday photographs] but there were also critical business files, such as the originals of all my graphics work.

I haven’t been able to do a tap of work since the failure, and am having a difficult time with a couple of demanding clients. Hopefully, by tomorrow I’ll be able to get back in the saddle and do some of the backlog.

Life would be so much simpler if I could only retire.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

10 comments so far

English Mum

Oh no! Will you be able to get it back, do you think? Frankly I’m terrified of computers – we backed our laptop up to one of those little stick things, but they next time we plugged it in it wouldn’t recognise it. Scary. But will you get your photos and stuff back?

Sorry, I sound like one of the kids when you’re trying to fix something going ‘is it done? have you fixed it? is it done yet? Hmm? hm??’

January 2nd, 2009 at 12:04 pm

Richard

It is a very long and tedious process. I have now managed to retrieve all my vital files, and am now trying to restore the laptop so that it works again. That is proving to be very difficult.

January 2nd, 2009 at 12:57 pm

robert

That is an excellent analogy!

At least repairing it will keep you away from the ads on T.V. I’m in the middle of sorting out the fifth new laptop that was purchased as a Christmas present where the following day Vista keeled over and died.

I always hated Vista but I think I’m going to have to change my tune because it has been keeping me in beer money

January 2nd, 2009 at 1:23 pm

Richard

I’m not blaming Vista as such. I think it was another application that screwed up my MBR, my BOOT.INI and all the partition info on the primary disk. On the whole, I’m quite happy with Vista, though this new machine [Toshiba Satellite L350-170] seems to have a lot less niggly problems than the old Acer Aspire 7220G.

January 2nd, 2009 at 2:50 pm

robert

You haven’t come across the dreaded crcdisk.sys problem yet? For some bizarre reason some Vista machines just decide to stop booting up. Booting in safe mode freezes just after crcdisk.sys loads.

It’s a nightmare problem and the only way I could ever get around it was to restore from the system cd’s. There is plenty of discussion about it all over the net but none of the suggestions there ever worked for me.

January 2nd, 2009 at 3:12 pm

Richard

My problem was that my restore sector was badly corrupted, and of course they didn’t provide any CDs with the machine. I did manage to find a very neat free utility though which I may mention in a day or so. It creates a bootable XP DVD with rakes of utilities on it for system restoration.

January 2nd, 2009 at 3:17 pm

robert

I think I know the one you are on about. I came across it myself the other day.

One of the laptops that I had to restore the other day was an Acer but luckily I knew someone else who had a similar one who actually created the restore CD’s.

8 of them! I told him that he had the option of making two DVD’s instead. The look on his face was priceless as he said he spent something like 2 hours shovelling in blank CD’s.

Incidentially if you (or anyone) goes to create the Acer restore CD’s you only need CD 1 and 2. I have no idea what is on the rest except for CD 8 which is the driver CD.

In true idiotic fashion you can only burn that one only agter having burned the previous 7 so it might just be worth having a CD with the downloaded drivers around.

January 2nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm

Richard

Aha!!!! You don’t have a copy of those CDs????