Where the fuck is my axe?

[the_siobhan]

I am not having a good day.

My computer is fucked. Fucked. I've gone through the entire windows troubleshooting menu and reinstalled the OS, and it still will only boot up into safe mode. And crashes in that.

Everything is on that computer. I am not happy.

And I've sprung another leak. A bad one this time -- the hole where they put the drain just opened up spontaneously and started weeping last night. I patched myself up with gauze, but it won't stop. I didn't even do anything worthwhile to make it do this.

It throbs a constand reminder. And I'm so frustrated I could scream.

Fuck. This.

I'm going to the grocery store and I'm going to buy myself something nutritious and healing to eat for my lunch. Then I'm going to have a good cry, or maybe a temper-tantrum, whichever I feel more like.

Then I'll go back to work.

Fuck

Comments

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

Damn. I'm sorry your day is sucking so royally. I hope it gets better *quickly*.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i am guessing that you have reinstalled the os over the top, rather than a format-and-reinstall, because you say that everything is on that computer.

if so, there are some settings that do hang around that may be causing you problems. alternatively, it could be hardware (memory or motherboard, maybe?)

my recommendation in either case would be to go in in safe mode and get your data off, and then take it up to the top of the house and drop it out the window.

er, you could probably just format and reinstall, or start replacing parts, instead, but dropping it out the window is likely to be more therapeutic.

if you're still leaking, however, make someone else carry it up the stairs.

[the-fury.livejournal.com]

Use a system disk and do a full scandisk on the beastie. If that turns out allright, put the HD in a different machine (preferably one with a burner) as the slave and save your data right some quick. If the scandisk fails, you might not have a chance to back it up.

Once you can get your irreplacable data backed up, and it doesn't seem you can do any more. It might be time for a fresh partitioning, fresh format, and a full reinstall onto the clean drive.

Could it be flaking for other reasons, such as a fux0red power supply?

hold the axe for a moment

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oh, windows unjoys. *bleagh*. been doing that myself recently.

hard to say with this little information what is wrong with it. how did it originally die, before you reinstalled the OS? just reinstalling doesn't get rid of possibly problematic stuff, as kalmn said; that can hang around in the registry, or in the form of a bad driver.

or it could be a hardware problem. how it dies might be informative -- any error messages? BSOD (blue screen of death)?

one way to get your data off if even safe mode doesn't work is to install the OS onto another partition, boot into that, and then you can get things from the old one. unless, of course, there is a drive hardware problem. if you don't have another partition, but your drive isn't full, you can use a program like partition magic to non-destructively resize the old one to make room for a new one. partition magic rocks.

what you really need here, however, is some serious windows geek help, preferably in person, because debugging a broken windows install is a bear even in person, nevermind over LJ.

[cosmicstar.livejournal.com]

Sorry about your sucky day. Good food always helps.

[serpentstar.livejournal.com]

You mentioned multiple hard drives -- have you got Windows installed on more than one of them? That can cause serious problems. You don't necessarily have to physically remove all of 'em, but I would try switching all but the one with all your data on, off in the BIOS.

Of course you probably have tried all this stuff already. . .

final verdict...

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

... a fucked power supply. (Good call, the_fury.)

the_axel replaced it with a donated power supply, and threw in a second harddrive, which he made the master and installed Windows onto. Then we copied over all my files -- to be sorted out later -- and reformatted the old drive.

Worked like a dream. And I lost nothing.

<sappy moment>
One of the coolest things was sitting there watching my two partners sitting with their heads together trying to get my network card to work. Heh.
</sappy moment>

Yay for geeks.