I mentioned a few days ago about being stressed at school. I talked with my adviser about the setback I encountered, and we came up with a game plan to get around it. All was good. Ha! How naïve of me to think so. Since then, I had a massive hard drive issues that threatened to derail me further. Actually, I had two hard drive issues.

The first was with my external hard drive that has all all my research data on for the project I’ve been working. I know, I know, I should have a backup – but that’s hard when you’re talking about Terabytes of data. After I restarted the computer the disk would not mount. I could not access any of the data. Campus technical support couldn’t figure it out. There suggestion was to reformat the drive, but that would delete all my data. I got so stressed out about it, I ended up with a horrible migraine Saturday night. That’s when my wonderful husband saved the day.

Domingo realized the computer couldn’t read the drive because of an incompatibility with the BIOS. The BIOS controls what the computer does when it’s turned on. It meant two things. Reformatting would only work until the computer was turned off. Once the computer was booted again, the incompatibility with the BIOS would surface again and the drive would no longer be accessible. And secondly, there was a possibility there was no problem with the hard drive, and that my data was still in tact. Sunday, we took the two hour trip to campus, and he confirmed the problem. We brought the drive back home, and since then have been transferring the data to an external drive that my computer at school will be compatible with. Had Domingo not figured out the problem I not only would have lost my data, but I would keep loosing the drive every time I restarted my computer!

Then, yesterday, I had a personal hard drive crash. I booted my desktop to get a disk head crash error message. Disk head crashes are often unrecoverable. Sometimes the drive will still work, but it’s usually prone to more crashes. In this case, I was able to start the computer just long enough to copy all the data off before it crashed for good.

I am so glad to have survived the week without any data loss.

Posted in Student Life | Tags: Computer Troubles