Slaxxor

Okay, so the reason I haven’t posted anything new recently is that my computer has basically screwed me over.  I woke up on Saturday morning and decided to plug in one of my spare hard drives to my computer.  This didn’t go so well.  I plugged in the 40gb drive and turned the PC on.  Bios detected nothing, and also my DVD rom had vanished.  I unplugged the HDD, and I eventually figured out that the DVD drive’s IDE cable had come out…on Sunday evening.  Lol… Sunday morning, I turned on my computer, logged in at the login screen (of Windows, unfortunately), and BOOM.  Windows logs me out as soon as I caught a glimpse of my desktop.  I tried logging in to the guest account too, but the same thing happened.  I researched the problem on a different computer, and came to the conclusion that one of my antispyware programs had removed a vital windows file because some piece of adware or spyware renamed it.  This caused the login/logout loop.  The solution was to copy over a new copy of the file from the Windows recovery console.  Only problem was, I hadn’t figured out my IDE cable issue on the DVD drive yet, so I thought I was locked out entirely.  I spent like four hours trying to get my computer’s BIOS to let me boot from my usb drive and stick a new copy of the file into the system32 folder, but it was to no avail.  Eventually I rechecked all the cables in the computer and discovered the unplugged IDE cable, and fixed it.  I tried the solution that was posted in multiple forums, to recopy the .exe into the system32 folder.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work.  At this point, I decided to repair my Windows installation in a desperate attempt to get into my computer.  One problem.  It didn’t work.  I repaired the Windows installation, and then when it went to restart the computer to complete setup, my display shut off as soon as I saw the Windows setup screen.  My monitor went to sleep, its little blue light flashing on and off, mocking me.  My thoughts now turned to file preservation/recovery.  I tried Hiren’s BootCD, which by the way is an amazing tool for PC repair, but so far I haven’t been able to access the harddrive, as the file managers seem only to be able to read my floppy drive, the cd-rom, and the 50mb drive it mounts in the memory to operate.  Pretty unhelpful.  I tried resizing my main Windows partition and creating a new one, and then installing a fresh copy of Windows there, but I either had the same problem or it booted the wrong partition.  Who knows.  This brings you up to the present problem, what data I should sacrifice if it is indeed unrecoverable.  There is a slight chance that if I didn’t format my main partition but overwrote the copy of Windows, I could use a file recovery tool to undelete my old My Documents folder, but it’d be quite risky.  Anyway.  That’s my epic saga/chronicle of computer mistakes.  Thanks for reading.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 8:58 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.