Posted 12:04 PM by Floyd

Everything went black (with white lettering)

Yesterday I turned on my computer and it would not boot; instead there was a weird error message. I rebooted a couple of times to give it a chance to fix itself. (Maybe I should have slapped it on its back.) Second verse same as the first, so I broke out of the config.sys script and tried to edit it:

edit.exe: Error

I called my friend Dave who is a high-powered sysadmin at WebTV. He claimed to know little about Win98. His first suggestion was to scandisk the disk:

scandisk.exe: Error

Dave then basically said to take off and nuke the site from orbit, by which I mean to reinstall the OS (which wipes out all data on the hard disk).
He said I could try to use the Win98 CD's repair function to replace the missing files that confused the setup scripts.

Dave had helped me figure out that my built-in Zip drive was on B: in MS-DOS (it's D: in Windows), so my plan was to write all my recent data to Zip disks and then muck around with the Win98 CD. I started navigating about in MS-DOS. I was going to say "it's the Windows equivalent of being a quadriplegic" but then I realized that I was healthy and it's a beautiful day out and I'm going hiking, and felt ashamed of myself when I thought of what real quadriplegics have to go through. Still it was difficult. My plan was declared moot for two reasons:

• Although I could read B:, I could not write to it.
  
• All the files that I had worked with yesterday were gone. So were all the directories containing the programs I had run! No more Eudora (my mail client), no more Netscape, no more Civilization III (sob!), no more Palm Pilot data.
  

Dave thought that the fact that this pointed to a FAT corruption.

That afternoon I decided to seek professional help, and called a tech who had helped my wife and her boss when their office computer had had hard drive problems. He said more or less the same thing Dave did, which was that my hard drive was probably fried and that fixing the FAT table would not solve the underlying problem. I had thought that hard drives occasionally wrote or contained the wrong data, and that outside agents like cosmic rays could corrupt hard disks. (The attraction of this belief being that if nothing was fundamentally wrong with my hard disk, I could fix the FAT and be on my way.) Now I am a brave man -- you can tell because after losing my Civilization III saves I am gamely typing on my weblog at a computer in Kinko's instead of being curled up in a ball -- but I'm not brave enough to ask Bo the tech if the problem could be cosmic rays.

After I get done here I am off to Fry's to get a new hard drive and some more memory. Tomorrow Bo will install the new drive, then mount the old drive and attempt to recover my data. Wish me luck, but feel free to focus on someone who has real problems.