Hello all, my PC recently died, the hard drive was the culprit. RIP, March - December. I have revived my pc now though although I have lost all of my data. Here's what happened even though I don't know what happened to cause this.
A few weeks ago I was on vacation at Hershey, Pennsylvania and playing the NFS pro street demo, merrily racing away at 180mph when my computer did a well known random crash. This was the third time that day that it had happened. I had recently tried a quick cpu OC for a few more FPS in the game and thought that the OC might be the culprit. I reset the clock speeds back to stock and continued playing for a bit then went to bed, leaving my computer on.
I woke up the next day and my pc was off, I was a little angry because I knew that I had left it on and that meant that the strange random crash problem hadn't been the OC. So I sit down at my desk and power on, everything is fine so far, POST, BIOS screen, windows logo.. then blackness! my pc rebooted mid boot. "WTF!" was my only expression. I tried again, same thing after two bars of XP logo screen.
Quite confused, I hit up Google with the only thing I could think of "boot problems". Heh. I concluded Windows must have fudged itself somehow, maybe a missing system file or whatever, I knew the hardware was fine since it made it made it to the XP logo. . I have a 250gb hard drive and usually only partition about 200gb of it when I install XP so I could have a second installation on the same drive if something went wrong with my primary one. (a while ago i had to reinstall alot due to hardware problems) Well I was on vacation and didn't bring my XP cd so I couldn't do squat. Was stuck for a week without my gaming computer, only my laptop :*(
When I got home I didn't want to attempt to do a XP repair, I have not done it before so I didn't know if I could incapacitate the drive permanently accidentally somehow or not. My plan was to use that extra 50gb of space to install XP, boot up, check to see if my files were even still there. When I chose to install xp in the new partition I got an error message. It said something was wrong with the C: partition (main) and wouldn't let me install xp on the D: partition. I didn't think to write down the exact message for future reference. I was really shocked by this, I did not expect that to happen. Well I was pretty discouraged after that, and got lazy so I pretty much left it alone for a week or so
After all my laptop is pretty fast.
When I finally got the motivation to try to salvage my drive again, I went with the longest, most illogical route possible. Instead of what I shouldn't done which is take the drive out, put it as a slave in another computer and back up the files like I should've done all along, I went the route of trying to boot up into xp on this machine. Yes. I was really that lazy that I didn't want to take three minutes to take out the drive. Wow So I slapped in my 4gb flash drive and started up setup. It didn't work, didn't know why it just didn't. Then I tried the 5gb recovery sector of an old harddrive from a manufacturer built system. didn't work, don't know why.
Ok finally I take out my broken drive and put it in one of my various other machines and check the properties box, it says that the drive has.. 2...2...5...gb free data.. holy.. hell... 225gb of free space. wow. I tried another machine, just for fun, same thing.
This was the most interestingly bad thing that happened to me. Confused and bewildered I took the drive back to my hdless machine and tried to boot up again. Instead of getting to the XP logo like it had previously doen before, it stopped right away after the bios screen and gave me a different error message, again I didn't bother to write it down, the lazy thing you see. It wasn't the "insert boot disk" or "could not find system file" it was actually about five sentences long basically summarizing the fact that my drive was toasted.
In fact, my drive was not toasted, the data had just mysteriously deleted itself! A little angry I popped back in my XP cd and reformatted the whole drive, then partitioned off the usual 200gb of space and installed xp again. So here I sit at my XP desktop, staring the singular, lonely icon, the recycling bin of defeat. Mobo cd in hand, I begin the recovery process.
Ty for reading I hope someone finds this interesting. Kinda carried on for a while there when I coulda just written a few sentences and done the same thing but hey Don't feel bad, I should have backed up my drive regularly like I do on my other machines. This machine is just for games so it doesn't have any important data on it, that is why I don't bother. I have no idea what happened to cause this, perhaps vibration? Maybe someone took a magnet to my case when I was sleeping? Is Bill Gates upset I've activated this same version of XP 14 times over the last two years? I don't know. ty for reading x2.
A few weeks ago I was on vacation at Hershey, Pennsylvania and playing the NFS pro street demo, merrily racing away at 180mph when my computer did a well known random crash. This was the third time that day that it had happened. I had recently tried a quick cpu OC for a few more FPS in the game and thought that the OC might be the culprit. I reset the clock speeds back to stock and continued playing for a bit then went to bed, leaving my computer on.
I woke up the next day and my pc was off, I was a little angry because I knew that I had left it on and that meant that the strange random crash problem hadn't been the OC. So I sit down at my desk and power on, everything is fine so far, POST, BIOS screen, windows logo.. then blackness! my pc rebooted mid boot. "WTF!" was my only expression. I tried again, same thing after two bars of XP logo screen.
Quite confused, I hit up Google with the only thing I could think of "boot problems". Heh. I concluded Windows must have fudged itself somehow, maybe a missing system file or whatever, I knew the hardware was fine since it made it made it to the XP logo. . I have a 250gb hard drive and usually only partition about 200gb of it when I install XP so I could have a second installation on the same drive if something went wrong with my primary one. (a while ago i had to reinstall alot due to hardware problems) Well I was on vacation and didn't bring my XP cd so I couldn't do squat. Was stuck for a week without my gaming computer, only my laptop :*(
When I got home I didn't want to attempt to do a XP repair, I have not done it before so I didn't know if I could incapacitate the drive permanently accidentally somehow or not. My plan was to use that extra 50gb of space to install XP, boot up, check to see if my files were even still there. When I chose to install xp in the new partition I got an error message. It said something was wrong with the C: partition (main) and wouldn't let me install xp on the D: partition. I didn't think to write down the exact message for future reference. I was really shocked by this, I did not expect that to happen. Well I was pretty discouraged after that, and got lazy so I pretty much left it alone for a week or so
After all my laptop is pretty fast.When I finally got the motivation to try to salvage my drive again, I went with the longest, most illogical route possible. Instead of what I shouldn't done which is take the drive out, put it as a slave in another computer and back up the files like I should've done all along, I went the route of trying to boot up into xp on this machine. Yes. I was really that lazy that I didn't want to take three minutes to take out the drive. Wow
So I slapped in my 4gb flash drive and started up setup. It didn't work, didn't know why it just didn't. Then I tried the 5gb recovery sector of an old harddrive from a manufacturer built system. didn't work, don't know why.Ok finally I take out my broken drive and put it in one of my various other machines and check the properties box, it says that the drive has.. 2...2...5...gb free data.. holy.. hell... 225gb of free space. wow. I tried another machine, just for fun, same thing.
This was the most interestingly bad thing that happened to me. Confused and bewildered I took the drive back to my hdless machine and tried to boot up again. Instead of getting to the XP logo like it had previously doen before, it stopped right away after the bios screen and gave me a different error message, again I didn't bother to write it down, the lazy thing you see. It wasn't the "insert boot disk" or "could not find system file" it was actually about five sentences long basically summarizing the fact that my drive was toasted.
In fact, my drive was not toasted, the data had just mysteriously deleted itself! A little angry I popped back in my XP cd and reformatted the whole drive, then partitioned off the usual 200gb of space and installed xp again. So here I sit at my XP desktop, staring the singular, lonely icon, the recycling bin of defeat. Mobo cd in hand, I begin the recovery process.
Ty for reading I hope someone finds this interesting. Kinda carried on for a while there when I coulda just written a few sentences and done the same thing but hey
Don't feel bad, I should have backed up my drive regularly like I do on my other machines. This machine is just for games so it doesn't have any important data on it, that is why I don't bother. I have no idea what happened to cause this, perhaps vibration? Maybe someone took a magnet to my case when I was sleeping? Is Bill Gates upset I've activated this same version of XP 14 times over the last two years? I don't know. ty for reading x2.
Facebook
Twitter