Santa’s Last Name is Murphy   By Larry Anders, Librarian, Tampa PC Users Group Larry@AndersNet.com

I hope you had a great Christmas! Mine was a good one, spent with family and friends, opening presents, eating a lot and trying to forget what had happened to me on Christmas Eve day. Remember these two Murphy’s Laws: “if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong” and “all’s well that ends.”

It had been a very long time since I had had a major computer problem, and I forgot that the longer it has been since you’ve had a major problem, the closer you get to another one! When installing a new operating system or virus protection program I ALWAYS create a copy of the emergency repair or recovery diskettes… except this last time. I recently purchased a new 100-gig drive and decided to start out clean with a new version of Windows 2000. It had been over a year since I purchased my last computer and a lot of stuff had slowed down the old 30-gig drive.

I had been very careful not to burden the new drive with a lot of needless programs, and for a couple of months it was operating like a brand new system all over again. I typically don’t turn off my system unless it starts acting a little funny, and that is what it was doing Christmas Eve morning. So, I rebooted and then it happened. I met Mr. Murphy and the blue screen of death, with a message that said, “inaccessible_boot _device.” There was some other verbiage saying that it may be caused by a virus or some recently installed new hardware. My virus definitions were up-to-date, and the only new hardware recently installed was the hard drive that had just crashed.

Well, there were a lot of things I should have done to be prepared for something like this, but I hadn’t done any of them, and the more I thought about what I had lost the more upset I got. As I would learn later, the easiest thing I could have done was to have made an emergency repair disk, but Windows 2000 doesn’t ask you to do that when the system is installed. And something I did not know at the time is that you cannot make a boot disk in Windows 2000 like in Windows 98. Under this situation, you boot to the Windows 2000 CD and insert the recovery disk when asked.

 Well, when I realized that there was apparently nothing I could do, I booted to my “D” drive, which is actually my old, original 30-gig drive. The new 100-gig drive could be seen but not accessed. I got a “corrupt or inaccessible drive” error.  I started calling friends and relatives and ended up with several possible cures. My biggest and most immediate concern was to get some very important work data off the drive, no matter if I could recover the rest or not. But the more I thought about what was on the drive, the more I realized there was a lot more data on that drive that I did not want to actually live without.

My daughter, Lauren, who is the MIS director for a company here in Tampa, told me about a program that might do the job for me by Ontrack called EasyRecovery, and it did! I installed EasyRecovery and proceeded to ease my mind. The data recovery process was pretty straightforward but I soon realized that the 50-gigabytes of data weren’t going to fit on the remaining 14-gigs of space on my old drive. So, I went shopping Christmas Eve and bought myself a new 80-gig drive. I took a day off from the recovery process Christmas day and got back at it late the following day. I installed Windows 2000 on the new 80-gig drive, re-installed EasyRecovery and copied all the files from the 100-gig to the new 80-gig drive. Once my data was safely backed up, I sent Mr. Murphy on his way, or at least I thought I did.

For some reason, when I booted to my new drive, I could not read my old “D” drive, so I re-booted to the old 30-gig drive and got the blue screen of death on my old drive. But, earlier in the day I had made an emergency repair disk for that drive. So, I booted to my Windows 2000 CD, put in the repair disk when asked, and I was back to normal, on the “D” drive. I then re-booted to my new 80-gig drive and made an emergency repair disk for it, which I should have done immediately after I installed it, but sometime I surprise myself.

Then I got an idea. I inserted my original blue screen drive, booted to the Windows 2000 CD and inserted the 80-gig hard drive repair disk when asked to do so and I was back up and operating after only 5 days.

What caused it? I don’t know! Will it happen again? I don’t know! Am I ready if it does? You bet your sweet #@$ !!!

The reason I am writing this article is to remind you, and me, to backup your important data right after you create it. And if you haven’t made a recovery disk, do it now! And be prepared, or at least think you are prepared. Murphy also says, “If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.”

Another of Murphy’s Laws is, “All great discoveries are made by mistake.” In my case it should read, “All great discoveries are made by the mistakes made.” And, I make a lot of great discoveries!  u