To be honest, I am not quite sure what caused it. Not like it really matters, because it happened plain and simple. My harddrive croaked
– Did you get that? It died. It ceased to function. It worketh no more.
The past few days have all been such a blur, I am not sure if it happened on Thursday or Friday. Although, I am leaning towards Friday.
My computer had done some “automatic updates’ and needed to reboot. After rebooting, and just after the bios post it just hung. Nothing happened.
The harddrive would make a random noise, but the computer just sat at the baby blue “Welcome” screen.
Don’t panic
Ok, this is no big deal. I can handle this. Really, I can. I have a spare 300 GB SATA drive. It’s brand new, but I have only used IDE drives in the
past. I was pretty sure they had to make some sort of adapter, so I gave Intrex call. The bloke on the phone confirmed
they had the adapter I needed.
After picking Talon up from school — green again with no tally marks! — we drove over to Intrex and purchased the
adapter. I was expecting it to cost about $50, but was pleasantly surprised at it’s $14.95 price tag. The adapter and harddrive installed quickly
and painlessly, and within a few minutes I was reinstalling Windows XP.
The install completed without any complications. A few odds and ends needed to have their drivers reinstalled. No sweat,
Google was my friend. I couldn’t read the numbers on my video controller so I shut down the computer
and pulled the card out so I could read the numbers clearly. I put the card back in and started the computer up and.. Wait a second.
Nothing is happening! The computer is not going past the boot screen. It is just sitting there, no noise, no sound, nothing.
I took everything out of the computer and tried just about every combination of peripherals I could think of, but nothing worked. It seems the drive –
the brand new, never been used 300 GB drive — was dead. That will probably be my only experience with a SATA drive. I ran out and
purchased a 320 GB IDE drive and started the process all over again. This time things went as they should and 2.5 days later, I am finally getting
back online.
Once I get a bit of free time (stop laughing), I am going to attempt throwing my original dead drive and my new dead SATA drive into another
computer to see if I can get anything off of them.
Oh well, what can you do, really? So much of our lives are kept on and revolve around computers. When something happens, it can definitely
be an “Oh shit!” moment. *shrug* Maybe it is just me getting older, or maybe even wiser, but this time I did not panic. Screw it.
