God Damn it All to Hell

[Chris]

So here I sit in a parking lot with a wifi connection because my house is ****ed.

Well, not my house, but my connection.

We had a series of storms this weekend here and apparently Comcast can't get the cable back up, so now I've got no connection.

What is worse... last couple nights I've woken up to see blue screen of death and now, now, it won't even boot up. Hard drive not found.... oh ya... the **** has hit the fan.

So anyways, this is why I've not been on the last couple days, and It'll likely continue most of this week.

Luckily I do have automated nightly backups of my important business files, emails, my documents, etc... but I think I'll buy a big terabyte drive so I can do nightly clones whenever my situation gets resolved. That way, I lose no files if it happens again... cause I tell you what... losing any files sucks.

[Chris]

okay, it is a dell xps running win xp with a 250gb sata hd.

When booting up if I hit f12 I can do a hard drive diagnostic test. I get a fail, return code 7.

If someone could give me any tips to fix it or something, I'd appreciate it, I just don't have the time to do the looking up myself consdiering I cannot connect at home.

This is why I'd get on the blescreen of death

http://www.ydeologi.com/2006/04/26/d...de-0x000000d1/

iastorsys

[Westech]

Ugh. Good luck getting back up and running. I had an experience like that not too long ago. There were really bad storms here and my power was out for almost a week. It screwed me up so badly that I'm considering setting up my new office with a T1 with an SLA and a big generator. It's pretty tough to get any work done at friend's houses and coffee shops with a laptop that's not your main PC.

About the hard drive: Google says that return code 7 means bad tracks or sectors. I'd recover what you can as quickly as possible then replace the drive. If it's your boot drive and you can't boot try hooking it up as a secondary in another computer or booting from a live CD like Knoppix and see if the disk is recognized and visible so you can at least back up whatever's on the good portions of the disk.

If it's not recognized as a secondary disk it's time to decide how important the data on it is to you. You can send it off to an expensive data recovery company, or you can try semi-proven home remedies like banging on the drive or freezing it in a ziplock bag.

[Chris]

I had an old window 95 bootdisk floppy I put in and it was able tor ecognize the drive, so it isn't all bad, apparently.

So I got scandisk running back home for like 90 minutes to try to fix bad sectors, the windows95 version of scandisk heh.

Looking up my purchase history at dell, I did buy it in 2004, so really, it is probably time for me to get a new one (it has been running slow lately anyways and pissing me off). So I ordered a new one from a parking lot last night, so now its about the data. If I can get it working again I'll give it to my wife to use, she could use a faster one.

The new one I picked out is raid 1 with half a TB. Data redundancy for the win.

[Xander]

That's the trouble living on the edge or away from city centres, you never get priorty in repairs. A few years ago there was a biggish storm annd my parents had no electricty and water for a few days while others close by in bigger places had no loss of services.

Regarding your hard drive, if you are unable to get the disk reading through Windows, you could try Spinrite (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) apparently is the best at disk recovery just costs $89. I've not used it myself but have had recommendations for it.

[Todd W]

Go get a phone and tether it. verizon or att have service in your area? I don't live in a big city and I get 'broadband' in my area through my PDA, and out of area it's still 15-20KB/s which is fine for email/forums etc.

As far as backups go I think I mentioned the software I use to do my backups on another post here. Which reminds me I need to re-configure mine and burn some DVD backups.

The next step to my data backup is to get a BIG gun safe with a long fire proof time rating andt hen stick a smaller fire proof safe in it... hopefully to save my DVDs/media backups

I wouldn't try to troubleshoot a HD in an old/bad system I'd use an external enclosure and use it on the new system to try to recover.

[Chris]

I was confused earlier, I wasn't scandisking my drive, but my backup, which had gotten mapped to C during bootup.

anyways, my drive is fried. I tried it in another PC, all it does is CLICK CLICK CLICK really loud, you know, mechanical failure. I'm sending it to a datarecovery place... Because... apparently my backup software wasn't working so hot... the most recent update I have for my email was june 3rd, and the other ones were much older... grrr....

Internet is backup though.

[Westech]

But look on the bright side: Now when you Google for dell xps hard drive diagnostic return code 7 the #4 result is "God Damn it All to Hell."

[Kyle]

The good thing from this Chris, is you will be setting up a simple raid from now on. Get a raid 1 setup always with 2 hard drives, no need for SCSI or anything. I always have 2 hard drives mirrored on my computers, even my 17 inch laptop. So if both HD's break at the same time, its an omen and time to find a new line of work.

[Chris]

so my new pc arrived today and I have been spending the last 4 hours just trying to get it to connect to my network. XP, it would have taken 1 minute, but Vista makes me want to punch a kitten.

I get this ubiquitous "Unidentified network" thing which apparently happens all the time for no particular reason with no particular solution. Every forum/page I find talking about it has a different reason and a different solution.

I can get it to connect if I don't run it through my router and hook it directly to the cable modem.

So now I'm on the phone with Vonage (whom I got the router from) to try to figure this out.

I am severely regretting getting vista on this, I should have gone with XP.

[Westech]

Supposedly Microsoft allows you to downgrade from Vista to XP if you have a valid Vista license. I haven't done it myself, but I'm told the procedure is:

1. Install XP from any XP installation disk you can find. Use the XP product key from the XP installation disk.

2. When you're asked to activate XP follow the instructions to call in and activate with a MS rep. Give them your VISTA product key and tell them you want to use it to downgrade and activate XP.

As I said, I've never tried this and only heard it secondhand. You may want to verify with Microsoft that this will work before you get started.

[Todd W]

Originally Posted by Westech

Supposedly Microsoft allows you to downgrade from Vista to XP if you have a valid Vista license. I haven't done it myself, but I'm told the procedure is:

1. Install XP from any XP installation disk you can find. Use the XP product key from the XP installation disk.

2. When you're asked to activate XP follow the instructions to call in and activate with a MS rep. Give them your VISTA product key and tell them you want to use it to downgrade and activate XP.

As I said, I've never tried this and only heard it secondhand. You may want to verify with Microsoft that this will work before you get started.

IMHO even paying to get XP Pro is worth it over using VISTA

[Chris]

well... got a new router now at the store, it works... but it isn't a vonage router... so now I gotta figure out hwo to get vonage to work... can I just plug one router into another? Hmm, we'll see

[rpanella]

Originally Posted by Chris

well... got a new router now at the store, it works... but it isn't a vonage router... so now I gotta figure out hwo to get vonage to work... can I just plug one router into another? Hmm, we'll see

Yep, you can just plug the Vonage router in one of the ports on your main router. That's how mine is setup.

[Chris]

anyone know anything about putty and vista? I can't get putty to load anything. gives me a gethostbyaddr error.