Darn hard drive on laptop.

This afternoon it looks like the hard drive that came with my Dell laptop was trying to give up the ghost and it lost 2 weeks of cached wu's. I had been using the lappy and went away for a few minutes to check on something and when I came back I found a black screen facing me saying that a boot drive couldn't be found. I went and did a hard shutdown then tried bringing it back up and the computer then saw the drive but Vista couldn't boot. I then ran through the Vista repair wizard and it restored to some earlier point (like a few weeks ago it looked like) and finally got to the desktop, but lost my wifi and the cached work units. I then pulled some critical data off the drive, shut down and luckily I had another hard drive I had bought when I got the laptop last March (in case I had compatibility problems with Vista) with XP Pro on it and got my machine back up and running. I then had to download the latest version of BOINC and the latest optimizations and install BOINC on this XP drive. So at least I have my laptop back up and crunching, but it makes me sick that the other hard drive trashed 2 weeks worth of cached work.

All in all though I came out OK on this. It was a good thing I bought the extra hard drive and installed XP on it for this laptop as otherwise I think the original hard drive wouldn't have lasted another 1 1/2 weeks before dying completely.

why didnt you try ghosting the drive???

Good job on having a plan B!

imposter said:

why didnt you try ghosting the drive???

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The restore borked the wu cache anyways and out here on the rig, I don't have any way to ghost it. I probably will do that when I get in from the rig though; I'm just leaving the ailing drive alone until I get back in and can try to ghost it.

I think from now on I will follow this "plan B" and have a backup drive with OS installed and ready to run whenever needed with my work laptop. I would have been up the creek without a paddle if I hadn't had the spare drive ready to roll.

I had something somewhat similar happen about 6 years ago on a previous laptop, but the drive was just losing sectors and not totally dying and was able to make the hitch with it. On this drive, I'm thinking that it's a problem with something on the pcb of the drive (gets hot and gets flaky).