Physician, heal thyself

On a fairly regular basis I deal with a computer that has decided to take advantage of their 401k and head off to Florida. Sometimes the motherboard dies. Dell SX270s have a known issue with a bad capacitor. The brown goo you see below is not good. Dell even extended the warranty for a year. That time has come and gone.

Other times the hard drive dies. If it’s just a corrupt Windows system file, it can be repaired. If not, I can “slave” the drive to a working computer and get to the files that way. When it’s a hardware failure and the drive won’t spin, you’re usually out of luck. It is very expensive to send the drive to a data recovery company.

So I rant and rave for people to back up their data, if not a bit by bit image of the drive.

Yeah, you can see it coming already.

The weekend of January 31st my Vista laptop starts behaving badly. Freezing. Nothing I can do, I do a hard shutdown, killing power. When I boot it back up, errors abound. Despite my best efforts, it gets to the point where it passes POST, but nothing more, not ever getting to the Windows boot screen. Blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner. Master Boot Record error that could not be repaired from the OS disk. It saw the Dell recovery partition, but not the C:\ drive. When I tried to use the recovery partition, that failed too. If I had my tools from work, I could have slaved it to another system, but I was lazy and did not want to go into the office.

This is the weekend I had to take my final Business Law test for my online class. And my online Visual Basic class was due to start on Monday. Sure, Mr. Container has his computer so I could work off that if I needed. This is a fairly new Dell Studio laptop. It shouldn’t have this kind of problem.

Guess who hadn’t backed up her data in over 2 weeks?

After a few hours, I gave up. I was getting tired and a little cranky. I slept for about 4 hours, than got up at 3:30am to tackle the problem again.

I reinstalled Vista from the CD provided by Dell. But I can’t find the CD with the drivers and Vista does not recognize either the wireless or the wired NIC. Major problem! Mr. Container also has a Dell and I know where his CD is! Pow! I install the drivers from that one and it’s close enough. I can now get a wireless connection and download the drivers from Dell’s site.

From there I install the other utilities and AV. Ah, it’s nice to be back where I wanted to be. A few issues to resolve here and there, but all good. It took several days before I could get the fingerprint reader to work, but it is happy now too.

Immediately I ordered Norton Ghost 14.0. Now I have a bit by bit backup of my drive. Never again.

I just have to remember to take an image regularly.