| My hard disk crashed recently. I want to tell you what happened and what I learned that can benefit you. At home I have a Pentium 90 MHz IBM-compatible computer that I use for much of my work. In December I started getting 'lost cluster' messages every time I'd boot up the computer. Norton Utilities would automatically scan my hard disk for viruses and other unwanted problems. One of the problems it would detect was lost clusters. I would opt to fix them, then I would start running Windows and Word, and all the other stuff I use on a regular basis. A month later I started to get other error messages. Some of them I could understand, some of them meant nothing to me. I received "Failure on INT 24" several times, "expanded memory not present or not usable" once or twice, and then more ominous messages like "This application has violated system integrity due to an invalid page fault and will be terminated. Quit all applications, quit Windows, and then restart your computer." At least the last one I could read. I didn't know what an invalid page fault was, but I did know how to follow the advice and restart the computer.
Okay, so something was up. I thought about viruses. I rarely received diskettes from anywhere, or anyone. I had not installed any new software, except for a game or two from the TPC BBS, so I was pretty certain it wasn't a virus. Nonetheless, I used the MS-AntiVirus software that comes in DOS, the software, and some software from IBM. All of it came up blank. "No virus detected." | I suddenly had this strange feeling, like, "better back up all your papers NOW Ben". I have learned to follow gut feelings, especially with illogical things like my computer. So I formatted a few floppy disks and started to use Pkzip to zip up all the files I wrote that I did not want to lose. This meant going into File Manager and then into Word and going through all my directories one at a time, zipping the files up and transferring them to floppies. This took about an hour. This was added insurance to supplement the files I already had backed up the previous week on my Colorado Travan tape drive. I thought to myself "what happens if the tape drive doesn't work? I can always reinstall the software, but if I lose all my letters, research papers, student grades, artwork, scanned newspaper articles, etc. |
| I will really be in trouble." Sure enough, just as I finished zipping the last of the irreplaceable files onto the fifth floppy, my hard disk crashed. First I tried the Norton Utilities Rescue disk, and received the following message: "Sector not found reading drive C:
Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?" I chose "Fail" which then brought me out of Windows to DOS and to the following message: "error estOO10: physical EOF before logical EOF on . RTL.
Invalid command.com
Cannot load command.co
system halted." Uh oh. I was never into est myself, but I could understand "invalid command.com." That last one meant that when I tried to restart my computer, it wasn't going to. Which it didn't. I pulled out my emergency DOS boot disk, inserted it into drive A:, and booted up. This worked, but when I tried to get to drive C: I received the following message: "invalid media type reading drive C: abort, retry, fail?" Big time uh-oh. Back to Norton Utilities. I booted up again with their Rescue Utilities and started using their various rescue programs. Unerase found lots of gobbledygook, all of it looking like extended ASCII characters. Unformat was able to rescue 2 clusters out of 1.2 gigabytes. So much for "rescuing my programs." I called around to a few computer genius-types who I considered higher up the ladder of enlightenment than myself. People listened and gave their advice. Kevin Ryan said that the FAT errors I had gotten earlier indicated that I would have to repartition my hard disk. |
