Friday, January 26, 2007

Boom, Crash, Burn

Those fragile hard-disk platters
It was 8:00pm on a Friday night and I was stuck at the office still second day in a row!

I was in my office trying to repair my work. Yes, my whole years of work that is contained on the rotating platters inside the small box on my desk.

My hard-disk has crashed and all forms of work ended as I know it!

No significant enough sign to think that it would go bonkers on me on Thursday morning after slowing down when shutting down my Excel spreadsheet.

After two days of investigating which drive was bad and salvaging whatever valuable data I had stored in my D drive, with the help of my colleague's PC, we were able to restore my PC as before with a new hard-disk and without my PST Outlook data file.

At the late end of what was left today, I was still installing some applications to complete the restoration of my work. I was like a new hire, with no history of correspondences. My MS Outlook congratulated me with a welcome note. Sigh.

Come Monday, I know I have a daunting task of collecting whatever emails I sent and many important emails with attachments for me to try getting up to speed with what I have worked to date.

Work at the mercy of Hard-disksHard-disks are so powerful, but so fragile. IT has informed that my hard-disk has had hardware failure and nothing can be done to it anymore.

Boom! It shocked me Thursday morning. Crash! It destroyed years of my correspondences.

Burn! Either trash the hard-disk away or burn a big hole in the pocket if I wish to send it to a professional recovery centre.

Recovery of data will range from a minimum of S$400.00 to about S$2,000.00 for extensive damage. An evaluation of S$90.00 will be charged for evaluation either way.

I was lost for words and "lost for work" without my PC!

That is how dependent I am and am sure everyone is with their PC in their work... to depend on those rotating disks that bound to fail after several years of use.

No decent amount of work could be done these past two days. I was there just staring at flickering boot-up screens after boot-up screens, and installations messages after another to bring-up my PC as before. Scary, just scary.

Burn! Back-up my data and burn important ones onto CDs. Yes that is what I have to do from time to time from now on.

6 comments:

  1. Sorry that happened man. I know how it feels to lose all of your work.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, too bad we all couldn't have a "back up" "Physically" on paper all printed out and in a file box stashed away somewhere near by us in the same room and or office that our pc's are in! If that makes any sense?..because I'm no computer whiz that's for sure..:(

    I'm so sorry this happened to you..it must be completely overwhelming for you and so stressful. Take some deep breaths and ask spirit for some help....you never know, you could get a miracle or "gift".

    Angels watching over you during this time,

    Rhiannon

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dude, how could you have not backed up important files?

    I back up everthing...

    What a hard lesson to learn.

    Sorry about the pregnant pause by Felicia went through a rough patch and she needed me.

    The way my son kicked her back out of joint, I think he is going to be a ninja!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow. Sometimes technology is not so great. I'm sorry for you. How stressful. I hope you can have a stress free weekend. Thinking of you.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Oh no. What a headache! good luck getting your pst file back. One of mine got corrupted once. I spent days working on it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hello All,

    Thank you for the stopping by.

    C-Dell | It's terrible to loose that much data all at once all of a sudden.

    Fortunately, all the other data like spreadsheets, word documents and others were retrieval and transferred to another hard-disk.

    This time will be backed-up with CDs. You just need to back-up your work, not just contented it will be safe in data drives.

    Rhiannon | You know how things are when we want to save the environment and go paperless.

    I just need to back-up my precious data onto another data-drives or CDs for my own sake.

    Yes, I do need divine power to somehow grant me a miracle to restore and retrieve my .PST file of my emails.

    Dirk Star | I know. I had a false sense of security that data drives will not get infected with virus or breakdown in its boot sector.

    That was why I have 2 drives... C:\ for Windows and applications and D:\ for data, which is a norm I guess.

    Now I have to religiously back-up my .PST files for emails too.

    Wandi | It was stressful. At first I was confident that data drives were so complicated to recover until I had my email files get corrupted. Yikes!

    Barbara | I got all other files in my D:\ Drives folders recovered except the corrupted .PST files for all my emails.

    Any pointers how you recovered yours, Barbara?

    Ellen | I have some relief, in fact an extra day too when I have my medical leave on Monday.

    The PC is sick and so am I. Sigh.

    Oh, yes, my tag is up. nothing interesting though. Don't doze-off on me while reading it.

    Thanks again everyone. Have a good week ahead. Back-up your .PST data too! Lesson learnt.

    ReplyDelete

Hello Everyone,

Thank you for stopping by and leaving me your messages. I will also try to answer any questions you may have for me.

Thanks again and have a good day.

Regards,
Muhd Imran
PAL Blogger