Blue Screen of Death

I've had to put a lot of things on hold in the last few days. My computer crashed!

Last Thursday and Friday I could only use my rusty laptop to communicate with my online friends. And I don't cope too well with a smaller keyboard so I made a lot of typos - please forgive me.

I spent a lot of time researching the various error messages I was seeing on my screen. And not getting any satisfactory answers. Eventually my computer hardware go-to guy arrived and diagnosed a failed hard drive.

Now I didn't expect this would be so devastating. I had RAID which should have meant (in my mind anyway) that one hard drive was the mirror of the other and if one failed then all the data on that drive was also on the other one too. Redundancy.

Mirror

What I didn't realize was that I had the other RAID. Performance. All my data was spread over both drives to make saving and retrieving files quicker. No mirror image!

I discovered I could read from the drive but not write to it. As long as both drives were running together I could rescue some of my files. So the next several hours were spent copying as much data as I could from the internal hard drives to an external hard drive. With the occasional blue screen of death (BSOD) stopping the transfer until I could reboot again, and again.

And trying to cram 3TB of data into a 1TB drive was a bit like Cinderella's ugly sisters trying on the glass slipper.

By midday Friday I had to give up. The drive failed completely.

I bought 2 new 3TB hard drives. I wasn't going to trust the remaining drive because it was the same age as the one which failed, about 5 years old.

Anyway, I got the computer up and running again. I had to reinstall Windows 7 so I could run the driver recognition program, Windows 10 is not supported. The computer is five years old and so are the drivers.

With Windows 7 running and the drivers all updated I was able to upgrade to Windows 10. I like Windows 7 but 10 is better in a lot of ways.

So many programs to reinstall. So many settings to configure. So many passwords to add to my browser's memory. It's now 10:30 pm Monday (my time) and I've made so much progress. I'm taking a break so I can write about the experience to share with my WA friends.

There is a silver lining to this cloud which I will share with you in my next blog.

Until then,