Google to the rescue

After wasting $40 at "Miracle" Computers (a term I will use loosely), I have revived my PC. All Miracle Computers had to say was "yep, it's your hard drive" - which is what I told them when I dropped it off, followed by "nope, can't recover any data, just replace the hard drive and reload everything." When I picked it up yesterday, they also offered to "try" to recover data for another $60-120, with no guarantees. I said no thanks, and thanks for nothing, and brought it home.

Seeking the greater and hopefully superior knowledge of the internet, Google directed me to others with similar symptoms, and using my handy bootable operating system CD (that came with the laptop), I simply ran CHKDSK. The first time, just to scan, which confirmed that there were errors found. With nothing to lose, I ran it again, this time with the repair option. An hour or so later, it finished, saying it had fixed some problems. Power off, reboot, and voila! It boots! The only warning so far has been that the registry was corrupted and rebuilt, but so far, so good. I spent the rest of the morning backing up everything I could think of onto our external hard drive. Luckily, I already had current back-ups of my most critical data, but it's nice to have some of the "recreatable, but a hassle" data also.

After spending a lot of money on truck repairs this week, I wasn't looking forward to buying a new laptop also. So, for now, I'm going to try to limp along with this one (backing up all changes every time I use it), maybe bring my work laptop home more often, and try to wait for the too-good-to-be-true Christmas sales that are bound to happen in a few months. I'm not complaining about getting four and a half years out of this machine, but if I'm going to have to reload all of my applications onto a new hard drive anyway, I'd rather do it on a completely new machine than a new hard drive in an old machine.

Isn't technology wonderful?