Still Broken

[kaitou]

Had an expensive phonecall with Microsoft, determined that it's a hardware problem. Computer is effectively dead. I may try to get all my information recovered when I go home, but I don't think I can get it done here. So now I'm typing from the school compter. Since there's no school tomorrow, I may and wheedle my way out of work so I can go to Osaka and get one of the Overseas Vaios. I can't take not having a computer. I miss my friends SO Damn Much, and I've almost run out of things to rent at the video shop.

There Have been good things that happened since my computer broke down though. Had a lovely Japanese style New Years with the Ushio family. They are so wonderful. Let me stay the night, and we went to a temple and a shrine at midnight to ring in the New Year, literally. Freaked out some of my students who were surprised to see me. Then the next morning we went to another shrine waaaay up at the top of a hill.

Called Heather and had a very good chat with her. Must call back and talk to Joe too.

Have played lots of SSX Three. I'm not sure if I like it as much as Tricky though. There's not as much banter between characters, the voices are different, and I can't play with Brodi. (So sexy) But the different courses are great, and the customability is very cool. (Bought Nate a big droopy moustache)

So, I miss you all, I will try to be online again as soon as I can.

Comments

[kaitou1412.livejournal.com]

ok... Well, what happened was I went to watch a DVD, and got a Bad Pool Caller (I believe it was) The computer backed itself up and went to reboot. This has happened from time to time, ever since both Microsoft Media Center and Disney decided that they wanted to be my DVD player. But this time when the computer rebooted......it didn't. All I got was a black screen and the words "Missing Operating System"

I had my Windows disc, so the very nice, but almost incomprehensible tech support lady led me through trying to rebuild the boot sector. But it couldn't. So we went to run Check Disc, but it couldn't barely begin the check. So I'm just stuck.

You know, the last time my computer died on me I had plenty of warning, lots of close calls. But XP just ran so smooth I didn't even know I was having a problem! Except for the DVD thing everything just ran like butter.

I'm going to ship the laptop home I think. I think there's probably a way to recover the data. And luckily I've got most everything backed up. Thank God I posted my Nano novel as I wrote it.

Once I pick up something new (hopefully tomorrow) my parents can send out the installation discs for Photoshop and GoLive, other than that there really isn't much software I didn't bring the discs for anyway. The only real pain is going to be reinstalling NetMD for my Minidisc, there's all kinds of hoops you need to jump through for that. le sigh.

If you have any ideas I'd be glad to hear them! Thanks for your nice comments lately!

[stormgren.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay.

No, sounds like bad blocks in the first few sectors in the drive. So hardware might not be too far off.

There's a trick I use for data recovery that consists of tossing the disc drive in the freezer for a half-hour or so (wrapped in a washcloth, in a ziploc bag. I then immediately take the drive, toss it in something, and image it ASAP before it gets hot. Most drive failures or issues are thermally related, so this works seventy-five percent of the time.

The other issue is a damaged motherboard or bad RAM, in which case, getting the data off the old drive is trivial.

As for the comments, it's nothing, really. I've enjoyed reading kaitou.net immensely, and posting random comments is the least I can do. Besides, I've been meaning to say "Hi again!" for a while now.