I thought I took it well

[cornerofmadness]

but once the tv was off and the book cover closed it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was up all night with anxiety attacks and mind racing over the whole how could you not have backed up in 2 months deal.

My computer died. Alphonse is very probably no more. two days ago I was getting messages that said 'your computer is in unprotected mode' but it coincided with a browser update I didn't do so didn't think it was anything more than an arm twisting to use the browser.

Last night it started up with winupd3748.exe wants you to allow it but I had no idea what that was and said no.

It worked for 3 1/2 hours then everything shut down with the messages you have a dozen critical registry errors. it fix about half of them but the rest not so much. They are in no particular order

disk Drive C is unreadable (oh fuck)

hard drive rotation speed decreased by 20%
Hard drive rotational speed exceeds system limits (um these two are contradictory I think)

Damaged hard drive clusters detected

hard drive space less than technical limits

RAM memory speed decreased

hard drive doesn't correspond to system restore.

boot sector of hard drive damaged

So, I'm screwed. I didn't have the last powerpoints i worked on this weekend on my flash. I do not have some of my erotica on my flash. enemytosleep please email me back my big bang so i can put THAT on my flash.

I think i'll go vomit some more.

Comments

[ital-gal.livejournal.com]

gasps. oh god hon. so sorry

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

it's not like the first, second or hell even third time for this (actually it IS the third time in 6 years). gah I should know better

[a2zmom.livejournal.com]

Oh Dana, I an so sorry. How awful.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thanks points up to another comment proving i SHOULD know better

[bay115.livejournal.com]

Ouch, sorry to hear that. Yeah, computers dying sucks big time. Hopefully you'll get that computer repaired or get a new one soon.

Real quick, I don't think you need enemytosleep to send your Big Bang back. You just need to go to your Sent folder and the attachment should still be there. At least for Hotmail/Windows Live attachments are saved under the Sent folder.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thank you very much. I have the sent folder disabled.

[enemytosleep]

Oh my! I'll reply back with a copy of your draft. What luck that you turned that in early!

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

I wasn't going to. I was going to work on it more but ELD said you'll forget....

thanks

[winters-queen.livejournal.com]

Oh hell. o.O

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

whimpers. now i'll be doing nano on an ittybitty netbook

[bob_fish.livejournal.com]

Oh no, so sorry to hear that. Thank goodness you have a laptop, even if it's small and not exactly ideal.

Re. retrieving your data, you could potentially take your hard drive to the university's IT people? If you have work stuff on there, then it's relevant, plus I've often found that once we've bonded a bit over all the cool nerd stuff they have lying around, they're willing to go the extra mile for a fellow geek. Anyway, good luck with that!

Re. back up, this is just going to be annoying now, but for the future, you could look at an automatic backup programme that backs your stuff up online or to an external hard drive. I use Backblaze, but there are lots of different ones. I'm so doofy that it's basically the only way I can back up regularly.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

IT can't do it. We lost over half our IT dept or they would for min. charge. they fixed it after the virus last year. I will take it somewhere tog et the data back.

I thought about carbonite but it costs too much. I will have to look into external hard drives but they're expensive (once you factor in my student loans I live on about 17K so I have very little funds for this stuff)

[bob_fish.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a real pain. Hopefully you'll be able to retrieve some data.

I wondered if you might already have an external hard drive, which would make that easier! If the files you need to back up regularly are smallish, you could always use this solution (http://www.labnol.org/software/backup-files-dropbox/18634/), which is 100% free. Automatically backs up your personal docs to Dropbox (which is also free). So your data gets saved to the cloud.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

I didn't know dropbox existed outside of academia. thanks for this.

[yuukihikari]

Oh good god that's nasty D: I'm sorry.

I don't know if there're things on there that you absolutely need and can't re-create, but if there are, do you know a tech guy or have access to a tech who can help you pop your hard drive out and hook it up to something elses? (Or maybe if you're comfortable doing that?) The data is still there despite what the errors say, and you can get it back... it just requires a bunch of effort and finnagaling and a funky USB hookup D: not sure if that's something you'd like to look into, but it's an option if you want to explore it!

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

I'm going to take it to either a local tech guy to do that or wait til christmas and have a friend try to recover it (AGAIN) because that could cost me nearly as much to do as to buy the new CPU

[rahirah]

Agh, I hate it when that happens. I hope you can recover the vital stuff!

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thanks. I might have to wait on that b ut i will try

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

Oh, no.

I'm so sorry.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

whimpers

[purple-smurf.livejournal.com]

Oh, hell. That's the worst thing D: Hope you manage to get your data back!

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thanks so do i but itmight take a long time

[silvrethorn.livejournal.com]

If there's any silver lining here, at least Alphonse died _before_ NaNo and didn't self-destruct and take your NaNo novel with him. What you lost was bad enough, but losing a NaNo project--and all your word count with it--would just be the last straw.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

you are so right. I would have cried

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

There is nothing worse in this modern world than a computer crash (IMHO). I have hurt so badly from them that when a machine starts to show his age (as Jonathan is doing now), I start to feel anxiety, if not full-blown panic. Fortunately this time I have a terrabyte external hard drive which I've been backing up on (and need to do again) so it doesn't happen to me again.

Good luck.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i know exactly what you mean. I knew this was coming. after that virus last year...i need to get that external hard drive.

[sillymagpie.livejournal.com]

Oh, no. I'm sorry to hear this.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thanks

[masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com]

{{Hugs my Mac}}

Sorry to hear this. Hope you can get it fixed.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thanks. i might be using my coworkers 10 yo mac at work...

[havocmangawip.livejournal.com]

SO MUCH SUCK!!! May the nerds be able to JOLT that thing into surrendering your files!

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i sure hope so