Hard drive crash and file corruption stole my Saturday
Last night, my computer begin to freeze for 10 seconds every five minutes or so. I have had similar problems before and knew it was the hard disk. The last time, I had scanned and fixed corrupt files using Windows and this had fixed the problem. I restarted my computer and it said “Cannot read disk. Please press Crtl+Alt+Del.” I tried rebooting multiple times to no avail.
I had a revision of a poster that I was designing due in two days and my only copy of it was on the failed drive! So I searched on Rachel’s computer for a fix or way around. There wasn’t much more that others said online, except that I should get another drive–the old one has failed. I was able to get to a command prompt via the Recovery Console of the Windows XP installation CD and ran CHKDSK. It said about a fourth of the way through the scan that the drive was unrecoverable. So I gave up for the night.
On Saturday, I brought a new drive and installed Windows XP on it with the aid of this site, Automatically Slipstream Windows XP, I was able to update my installation and did not have to install any service packs or hot-fixes. These usually require restarting the computer half a dozen times.
About 11:00 that night, I was finally back to working in Photoshop on the freelance poster project that was due the next morning. Thankfully, I was able to recover about 90% of the data on the bad drive.
