Writings

A PC Panic

Every once and awhile something terribly goes wrong with my computer it seems. Sometimes it results in a complete re-installation of Windows, other times I'm able to get everything back up and running. Fortunately the latter was the case on Thursday. That morning when I awoke, I knew something wasn't right. I always leave my computer on and am quite familiar with the reassuring "humm" of the PC fan. However, this morning it didn't quite sound right. After a few hours of reboots, virus checks, and more, things finally were back to normal. It was quite the fluke however.

I got out of bed to see what was up and noticed a "Stop" error. I figured it was some random hardware glitch, that depsite the stability enhancements in XP still can occur, and rebooted the system. I expected it to come up as normal and that would be the end of it. Upon rebooting nothing happened. To my shock, the hard drive wasn't powering up or being detected which was particularly troubling. I shut it off and opened the side of the case to inspect further. When I turned it on again, the hard drive spun up, and it seemed fine. This was a welcome discovery, so I put the side of the case back on and let it go. The system gladly booted up fine. Except, strangely enough one of my directories had disappeared after everything. So, I reinstalled Trillian. Fortunately I had my profile files in a separate location, and I have a program which automatically backs up all my data to a separate location on my hard drive as well as an external server on the network. So if something really major had gone wrong, at least I had my data. (An aside: ALWAYS ALWAYS backup regularly)

A few hours later, after a few reboots, virus check (by two anti-virus programs), spybot check, adaware check, and a visit to Windows Update, I was finally relieved that everything was OK. Fortunately everything still is okay, but I was worried. My final potential problem was with a \windows\system32 folder becoming corrupt. I recall some time before when this folder was corrupt, I had to reinstall Windows because it wouldn't boot. Fortunately, when I did reboot, chkdsk was able to correct the error.

Thank God it wasn't worse and that I was able to remain patient throughout this problem. I can tend to get quite frustrated with computer problems, and since I use my computer a lot, it is quite a setback to have to deal with big issues. But, everything seemed to work out alright. I can still be at ease since I have backups of everything. It just takes so long to reinstall Windows and download everything with a dialup connection. :p Thankfully it was just some random fluke. :)