Monday, December 08, 2008

Not Complaining, But

Tom Cat came home from the vet better but in, "Watch him and bring him back in if he isn't eating and drinking" condition. Stopped up and dehydrated -- either could be the cause of the other, and when I'm 108, I'll probably be hazy about such things, too. He's napping under the desk (in a catbed he's spurned for months) at present.

Earlier, I was sitting on the floor petting him and my steam-powered laptop made a funny noise, went BSOD, then decided it didn't know how to boot up. Successive frobbing brought it back up to the desktop once, only to fail in the same way -- so I'm presently on a salvaged machine from work I had sitting in reserve. Did I have backups for all the photos and data on the laptop? Had I saved my links?
Er.... [crickets].
Any data-recovery gurus out there?

Some days, I should'a stood in bed. And jumped up high enough to knock myself out against the ceiling, maybe.

13 comments:

  1. You may be able to slave the HD to another computer and get the goodies off before the machine lets the smoke out. That's if the BSOD is OS related and not HD related. Did you read the error message of the blue screen? With luck it said 'driver this' and you can salvage the data. If it said 'hardware this'... well... maybe you ain't livin' right. Did you puch some wheelchair bound old lady into traffic last week or sumthin?

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  2. try, at any rate. harvest them organs before rigor sets in.

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  3. These are handy

    http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3516746&CatId=2785

    uses the hard drive like an Atari Cartridge. Handy.

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  4. A bootable copy of Norton Utils (or others) on CD, 3.5FD or thumbdrive would be a good place to start.

    With a desktop PC that fails to boot, I have removed the C drive, taken it to another desktop as the D drive and fixed its broken links and bad sectors that way, but with a laptop ya can't do that.

    Captcha: requed

    P.S. glad Tommy's OK.

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  5. Og's got the right idea. I live by those things - I've just got piles and piles of hard drives and I just slot in the one I need (after looking at dozens to figure out which one it is...).

    Another option is to boot to BartPE, a Windows XP OS that lives on a CD. You can mount up a thumbdrive or a USB drive and transfer files or run file recovery software - don't try and recover data to the damaged disk or you can lose data forever.

    For file recovery and disk analysis, I'd recommend SpinRite from www.grc.com.

    Good luck, and good news on your kitty. Hope he feels better soon.

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  6. What method do you use to water your fur person companions? Mrs. Drang bought a table-top fountain some time ago, which quickly became known as "The Cat Fountain". Seems kitties like fresh, running water. Unfortunately, it has to be cleaned every week or two, all the loose cat fur in it clogs the pump.

    WV: submzing. Getting lost in a submarine, or less than amazing.

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  7. I have ordered the drive-dock, thank you!

    Next on the list -- and before I look at that drive -- serious antivirus.

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  8. You know that I know as much about computers as some certain politicians know about foreign policy. I do have a spare laptop if thinks get ugly.

    Hope kitty is OK. I'd recommend one of those mushroom tart things, but probably too much starch.

    But they do work for me.

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  9. Tom Cat is much heartened by your good wishes -- anyway, he purred and smoothed on my hand when I told him.

    The desktop machine seems to work, I'd just like to get my photo and text files off the old laptop.

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  10. RX, I had the crash from hell not too long ago that threatened to eat my blog and every last thing that was on my server. It wasn't an OS, problem, the drive actually died.

    I have a CD chock full of recovery tools at home. I got everything off the drive that was salvageable, and it worked so good it actually was able to pull files off the last PC that drive had been put in. If you want, I can put the ISO up somewhere or make you a copy and mail it to you. Be forewarned, it took a full day of running to get the data off, and yes, I used an external drive dock!

    I also went out and bought an external terabyte hard drive for backups and run some scripts every night. I now have 2 backup drives as well as all the data in their original spots (which is great until I get hit with an EMP blast and lost it all...). I suggest a big-ass external drive and scheduling copy jobs just to be sure.

    Huh. Word is catster. Imagine that...

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  11. Roberta, forgive me if I'm talking below your level here, but you mentioned a steam-powered (which I take to mean OLD) laptop, which is likely to have an ATA hard drive in it. The drive dock that og linked to is for SATA drives and won't work with an ATA disk.

    Drop me a line if I can be of any help!

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  12. Oh, dear! It's a Satellite 1800, about seven years old. So the drive dock may not work. (Still gonna use it for backups -- love the concept).

    One of my local friends (the Data Viking) has some cableage that might work.

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  13. It's a conspiricy! My laptop is out of action unless I go to Starbux for wi-fi. I'd sooner take poison, more flavorful. My living room computer died a horrible death. The vast left wing hope-a-dope conspiricy is attacking and destroying innocent gunny blogger's machines.......

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