Last week Tuesday, my pride and joy, decided to stop booting, and nothing i did helped. I couldn’t get into Safe Mode, and worst of all the fail-safe method of booting the Windows CD and “repairing” Windows didn’t work. It would boot, load the drivers, and just before the format or install Windows menu appears, the PC just hangs.
Worst of all, I had got pretty complacent about doing backups, and because of that, I had files on this laptop that I had nowhere else. :-(
Linux to the rescue
What to do? Defza came to my rescue and gave me a Live Linux CD. ( For those less informed, its Linux that runs of a CD, straight out the box. No installation needed.) So here I was, a Windows user, quickly learning Bash syntax, mounting and unmounting USB flash drives, and copying all the files I forgot to backup off the laptop and onto another PC.
I lost 2 days because of this laptop, and we still don’t know what is wrong. I formatted the hard drive from Linux, and the Windows CD still didn’t give me that menu I was oh-so-wanting to see for 2 days. So I started up the extra laptop that we had ordered, and made it my own. The non-booting Windows laptop is off to the supplier to find out what went wrong. So after all my struggles, it looks like some sort of hardware issue. :-( The only good thing that came from this is I learnt some very valuable lessons.
So here are my 4 tips on how to get your PC up and running again in next to no time after experiencing software or hardware failure.
- Backup your crucial files! Use a product like Beyond Compare that will backup all your files off to another networked PC. Backup your emails, critical work docs and all development files daily. It literally takes seconds to do this type of backup, but do you think we do them regularly enough? (Backing up to CD everyday, takes way to long. So hiving your files off to another PC everyday, and doing DVD backups once a month, saves you alot of time and effort.)
- Have a Windows CD, Linux CD or a Recovery CD handy at all times. You never know when your PC will crash and you are going to need to recover something off it using some sort of Live CD.
- Hardware backups. This is an expensive option, but having a PC that you are able to turn to when your main machine dies, is sometimes crucial. You might just as well take a weeks holiday while you wait for your only PC to be repaired at your supplier.
- Have a smart friend proficient in talking the language of PC, only a phone call away. You might think you know everything, but when the pressure is on, you might not be thinking of the most simple thing that might fix your problem.
So there you have it. I’m happy to report that I’m backup again, pun intended.
