This morning, I came in at 8, ready to get some work done before meeting some clients at 9. When I sat down at my desk, words to this effect greeted me on my computer screen:
“Disk read error, press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart”
Boy, this sure looked like the beginning of a bad day. So I did what it asked me to and restarted… a couple of times, and it still came up with that message. Apparently my hard drive decided to die on me today, and all my projects and important files were on it !!!.
The funny thing was that on the train this morning, I was thinking to myself, “I should really backup my important files and put them on the network share …”. So I opened up my computer case, looked at the HD, cables, power etc, tried switching cables to see if that was the problem, and my HD just sat there silently, apparently in a coma.
What ensued was a hectic day. First, I tried calling the clients who were supposed to meet me, and found out that one of them had the flu and couldn’t make it, but nobody could reach the other person. She ended up getting here, and had to leave straight away. Felt quite bad about that one, but what could I do? I sent her an apology email not long after that.
Next, I ran around the place trying to find the local support person to see if I could get a replacement HD, and if she had any ideas on how to fix my problem. I also needed to find a temporary computer to use so I can finish my projects that are on a deadline. Unfortunately, the two people I was trying to reach weren’t in until much later. So I then went around looking for a computer that I could use to try and setup my old HD as a slave; I didn’t care if the HD died, but I badly needed the data on it.
After I found one and was trying to hook up my HD, the tech support lady came along and gave me some advice. She told me to try what I was doing first, and if that didn’t work, she’d try use some recovery software, and as a last resort, send the HD in to the factory for data recovery. Thankfully, after connecting my old drive as a slave, I could still see my data, and quickly copied every important file to my shared network drive. Soon after, I managed to get a temporary development machine until the new HD gets in, so my important project won’t have to be delayed that long. Phew, that was quite a scare.
This was an important lesson for me. Ever the risk taker, I assumed that since the equipment was new, nothing like this would happen to me, even though I’ve had a HD die on me when it was only 5 days old, knowing full well that hardware problems could happen to anyone, no matter if it’s a brand new computer or an old one, and despite what all my instincts have been telling me to do, I ignored them and it nearly cost me a ton of work. This sure taught me to always, always, always x 1000 have backups of your work somewhere, because you just never know when your drive will decide to quit working.
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