The System is Down…

Well, I had a most interesting predicament the other day.  As I was finishing up a rather large program that I was writing in C (a basic database engine), I turned to work on a couple of things, and then, when I turned back to my computer, something stunning happened.

“CHIC-BHSHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWwwwwwwwwwwwwwww…….”

The system itself shut down, with a rather nasty sound, the likes of which I have tried to exemplify above.

Anyways, my one reaction was “Oh.  That can’t be good.”

After a bit, I made an attempt to reboot the machine.  It had hardly gotten beyond the BIOS screen when it stated rather simply “Hard Drive Failure.”

That’s odd, I thought, as I looked at the ominous grey-on-black command prompt.  I didn’t hear the hard drive crash or anything…

So then it was time to fix and rebuild.  Luckily, I run Linux on several of my machines, so I used a rescue disk on my big ol’ Windows box.  Remarkably, I was able to mount half of the hard drives.  I did a network backup, but since I have about a half terabyte of information on the disk, it took about a day over the non-gigabit network.

Then I went to the Great and Abominable Store (Best Buy) in order to purchase a new .5 TB hard drive.  I got in and out for only a few bucks more than NewEgg’s offerings on the same drive, so I was happy.  I came home, threw into the machine, and then I installed Windows fresh, copying original files.

The only problem I’ve run into on my system rebuild, CS4 would not work.  Photoshop crashes every time I make an attempt to open an image.  I have yet to be able to diagnose the reason.  Luckily, this morning I realized that I had not installed it on my 64-bit machine, so I installed it, and it’s running beautifully.

Anyways, here we go… rebooting life again.

And Lakewood has been running steadily for over a month!  YES!

Cheers!

-Doc