Drunkard's Walk Forums

A leave of Absense cuz my computer is in the shop for repairs.
While using it today, out of the blue every program shut down and I got a bunch of Error messages that looked too shiny to be Vitsa's normal "opps" message.
So I rebooted my computer.... and it wouldn't load. aprently the files for starting up got corrupted. >.

Sell a kidney for money!

ouch, good luck with the computer and life in general. hopefully it will rise again.

(you do a have a backup of all your data right?)
-Terry
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"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

All my important Data is on the secondry hard drive, it looks like it was the primary that got screwed.

anoying thing is that I ran a Malware yesterday and it found nothing.

It might be a bad sector. I've noticed that a lot of newer drives suffer from increased sector death due to the radial density.

I would recommend spinrite. But if you are short on money I'm not going to tell you to spend $90 on something that might not fix the issue.
-Terry
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"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

. . .

I have no idea what even half of that means Sweno

I can answer that for him, but the question actually is: Do you WANT to know?
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

lol, probaly not, sounds scary and expencive

scary: maybe.
expensive: well the information is free.

I will attempt to explain it in a non-scary fashion.

Hard drives (at least the ones that aren't SSDs) consist of rotating platters of magnetic media.
Each platter is divided into several thousand different regions (wikipedia link) that are the smallest unit that can be read or written to at a time.

If something happens to the physical media in a sector (solar radiation, loss of magnetic charge, manufacturing defect, etc) that prevents the drive from correctly reading the sector you get file corruption.

Most of the time you don't even notice when a sector is going bad, because the problem gets recognized before the sector is beyond recovery. The drive will read the data off the sector, flag the failing sector as bad, and write the data into a free sector (a percentage of the drives total space is reserved for just this occurrence). This happens all within the drive itself, totally independent of the OS.

As people demand more storage in the same physical space, the size of sectors has to shrink. And the rotational speed is also probably increasing as well. Which means it takes less going wrong before the drive has problems reading/writing to a specific sector.

The best tool I have found for failing hard drives is spinrite. It is the only tool I know of that will perform statistical analysis on problem sectors in an attempt to recover the data. At $90, it's not cheap. But I have personally seen it take laptops from non-booting to fully-functional.

But given that I have no guarantee that a spinrite could solve your problem (or even that corrupt sector caused this problem), I'm not going to tell you that you need to buy it.

I doubt that it was caused by a virus, as the motivation for writing them now is harvesting personal info. Making computers not boot doesn't get them any money, stealing your banking details or turning your computer into a zombie does.

(hopefully this has helped, and not just added more confusion)
-Terry
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"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

So Techies called with the following news.

Ram, good

2nd Hard drive (which is where I keep my stuff), good

Primary HD that windows is instaled on..... Dead.

so it's going to cost me about $135 for that and they give me a Windows instelation disk or I pay them $270 and they do it for me....

and I'm almost broke for another week.

Man my luck sucks, huh?

I'd recommend going to Windows 7 if you have the choice. Vista has issues. 7 is basically Vista with all the bug fixes. Also, 7 supposedly has routines built into it which will is supposed to rebuild a corrupt HAL.DLL error and reconstruct damaged boot data. Not sure how robust it is, but it's nice to see they're *finally* addressing that problem.
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Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do.

Yeah, to get that I need to go the more expencive option.... or see if My tech freind has a spare copy of 7 laying around.
So after 4 years, looks like I finaly have to pay for a legit upgrade to the beast.... and I thought I would of had to replace the CPU or Mother board by now.... posibly the only 2 orginal parts left in the box
Edit: no copy of Windows 7, so going for the cheeper option and instaling Vista myself.... witch will probaly take a while, then instaling all the other crap back onto the box, should be back online late monda or tuseday if I'm lucky.

Okay, computer is at home, not just running through all the crap you need to do when you have just instlaed an OS and that

Totally need you online before tomorrow so I can throw DS at the random Vanessa DeVore's that spawn in Carnie missions in place of some bosses bug We all know how much he just -loves- her

(I say before tomorrow since I believe thats when the patch to fix ze bugs is coming in)

Heee hee, still downloading drivers for my graphics card, so you will have to wait Terr