Monday was not a good day for me. Normally speaking, I love Monday’s as they are the start of a new week and I’m full of unrealistic aspirations of what I’m going to achieve. So what happened to change my typically upbeat positive demeanour?
It all started when I looked at my beloved computer that had been with me through thick and thin. I knew instantly that something was wrong and it wasn’t long before I found that my applications drive was non-existent. It was dead, kaput, cactus, non-useable and worse than all of these “invalid”.
I’m quite regimented in how I setup my computer. Data is on my NAS (Network Access Server) in a mirrored array that is backed up every night to a separate drive in a different machine. All is good. My operating system, MS Office and browers are on drive C in my PC on an SSD drive that is regularly snapshotted as a backup. The rest of my applications are on drive D and Drive D was the one that blew……sigh…..
Off to the computer store I went and bought two new 6 terrabyte drives which I then setup in a RAID configuration so they were mirrored for use as my new drive D. All was looking good until I again flipped the power switch to find that I’d lost my BIOS screen. That wasn’t good at all.
For those of you that are getting a little lost in the technical mumbo-jumbo the BIOS screen is what you often see before Windows starts up. It’s also the screen that I couldn’t get to appear, no matter what I did. Something serious was wrong.
Off I went to the computer store again with my PC under my arm. After several hours of testing we finally diagnosed the problem as a bit of dust that disrupted a contact on a RAM chip stick. Yep, you heard that right……a little bit of dust.
Being the intrepid computer nerd that I am, I now have a new UPS, new graphics card (may as well as I do have an Oculus Rift!), new mouse (my old one was dying) and a lot of work reinstalling everything.
One of the smartest things I’ve done is keep all the software that I install in a single spot on one of my backup drives. This meant I didn’t have to hunt around for it and I had everything at my fingertips……just one problem though.
Since Windows suddenly had my old Drive D vanish it was a little confused. It just so happens that according to Windows all of the applications were still installed but it couldn’t find them. This meant that I then had to uninstall all the errant programs and then reinstall them….but there was yet another problem.
Some of the programs behaved really well. They happily uninstalled themselves while other through up their hands and said, “Uninstall what? I can’t find what to uninstall.” Worse yet, some of those programs that I’d carefully installed on my old Drive D decided they would just litter the users directory of my Drive C with bits of data. Oh crap!
So in I went, deleting errant files, uninstalling and then reinstalling everything from scratch and you know what? I now have my PC up and running again! Hooray!
I’m now back up and running and only had about 2 days trashed out of my week. I do apologise to all of those people that I’ve not returned calls to…..I promise that you’re on my list.