Marshall Brain's Blog

This week I had a bad hard disk failure. Something in XP messed up and damaged the directory structure. The symptoms: The machine would not boot. It would offer to go into "safe mode", but then blue screen in the middle of booting safe mode and reset. It eventually led to the complete loss of the information on the disk (I back up about once a week, so I lost approximately a week's worth of stuff - most importantly, the photos of the twin's birthday). So...

Note to self - the next time your hard disk crashes, here is what you should do:

• Do not try to go to the recovery console and use "chkdsk /r". That seemed to be the thing that totally destroyed the disk. It made things worse rather than better.
  
  
• Instead, take the damaged disk out of the machine. Put it in another XP machine. When that machine boots, it may repair the disk automatically. If so, you are done.
  
  

Also, when you download photos from the camera, immediately back them up to a CD. It will only take a minute, and it will prevent this from happening again.