Saturday, January 23, 2010

DO NOT IGNORE WARNING SIGNS


It does not do to ignore warning signs.  Some months ago, my computer would not undertake a full malware scan with one of the programmes I have installed.  It was happy with the quick scan.  My other malware programme, which takes a long time to perform a full scan was okay. I had one that did and one that didn't do the whole job, I was comfortable with that.



Next, after leaving my computer for, say half an hour, I would return to find it had closed down and re-booted. Very odd, I thought. If I set it to sleep mode (standby) I could return to my earlier work.  Answer...use sleep mode.  However, irritating things happened, like freezing of programmes just a little too frequently. 


The last straw was my newly updated and paid for anti-virus programme could not complete a full scan,. though it was able to trot through a foreshortened scan.  It was definitely time to speak to an expert.  


The diagnosis is a corrupted hard disk, the damage appears intractable.  I can't complain though, it is the original drive and my computer in I.T. terms should be on life support.  Fortunately, all my data is on another disk drive.  The fix is to get a new hard disk and move my programmes onto the new one.  It has been explained to me how it will be done.

The silver lining in all this is, I shall obtain a much larger capacity drive, I won't need to ration my programme updates and downloads and my computer won't need resuscitating again for a good  long while. 

It was fortuitous that a long time ago, I had  installed a second disk drive, separating off my data from the main disk drive to  avoid the problem of corrupted data.  But.......and it is a big 'but', I should not have ignored the warning signs.  


I'm off now, to do a back up of all my data on my external drive.

4 comments:

zewt said...

it can never be entirely safe... we can only back up and hope that it's not corrupted too.

ZACL said...

Hello Zewt,

This very point was discussed. The computer guy was confident that with the current set up (My data is not on the C drive), the changeover to a new C drive should not be too traumatic. Programmes, should be O.K. to sort out. I would have been very distressed if my data had been affected.

As it is, I have a data back up from two days ago, and I can still use the computer for daily things. I shall have to respond quicker to fun and games with the data drive, if that ever shows symptoms.

Leah said...

I'm so glad you had a backup. I finally got a Carbonite subscription to back up my data. I lost about 8 months worth of photos with one crash, which is sad when your kid is only one year old. I also keep separate back ups of my novels...there are just too many years of work there to lose and the files are small. I even carried an encrypted jump drive with them on the trip here. :) But yeah, those type problems usually get me doing a disk scan, virus scan, etc. I used to work in the computer field and for people who fixed other people's computer problems all day, we tended to be the worst about actually keeping up with our own! :)

ZACL said...

Hi,

I have backed up data to the external drive from the internal data drive. It's only so good as the next time I add something to my data. That said, I wasn't backing up often enough. There must be a les cumbersome way.

It is sad that you lost your stuff on E's first few months. Is there no way of making a data recovery?

What is a Carbonite subscription?