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My computer died yesterday. My two-month-old MacBook. It was a hard drive crash, and it was sudden and demoralizing.
At 9:30 this morning, a data recovery expert will attempt to resuscitate. Fingers crossed. All those emails and songs and nifty Firefox extensions! I could go on all morning.
But I better not. Don’t let me bring this party down. We can take more photos of Bailey, and next time we can back them up.
And even if the last chapter of my digital life has been erased, what are you going to do? My computer failure probably pales in comparison to stories you’ve heard or nightmares you’ve lived through. For today’s installment in our Friday Happy Hour series, let’s talk about digital disasters. What happened? What deadlines were missed? What relationships were ruined? How’d you take out your aggression?
Note: I’m tying this blog entry on our 2004 Dell Inspiron, which has had a good run but is showing its age. Halfway through, this happened:
I need to take some time off from the computer world.
Comments (29)
Comment
Just don’t worry about it… Working for the US Government, my 1 year old dual-core, dual-processor workstation with 8 gigs of RAM has two inoperable CD/DVD drives and is the slowest in the office. That’s what $6k gets you in the government. More nap time. If I had gotten a standard $2k machine, I’d be forced to stay awake and play Yahoo pool instead. I guess I don’t feel so bad since my own tax dollars go to pay my own salary.
posted by Matthew on 10-19-2007 at 5:52 am
When I was a senior in high school, I was the editor of the photo and graphics section of the school newspaper (as well as the entire photo and graphics staff). I went to a boys’ rugby game to take photos; I brought my nikon digital SLR with its too-small photo card and my mac powerbook g4 so I could upload the pictures from my camera and free up space on the card.
Bad idea.
I left the computer in my car, hidden under the various items on my front seat, thinking it would be safer than if I left it out on the sidelines as I ran around taking pictures. However, there’s apparently a drug ring operating in my school’s neighborhood, and two members chose that particular day to break into every car in the school parking lot. Needless to say, I lost 20 GB of photos (aka my laptop). I had a nervous breakdown, since I hadn’t ever backed anything up.
Fortunately, they caught the thieves after a high speed chase down one of the main roads in my town. The idiots were high, and they crashed their car. I got my computer back–and I bought an external hard drive that night and backed everything up. The next day, my computer crashed, and the mac geniuses said it was a hopeless case. Macs don’t like getting bounced around in car crashes, apparently. I got SO lucky–I could have lost my entire high school career’s worth of photography!
posted by kay on 10-19-2007 at 6:12 am
I had a 3 year old HP laptop with a 40 GB HDD. When the HDD died my son did some research and found that Hdd had a history of dying right at the 3 year mark. He found another like it, so I gave him the computer so he could e-mail me. Which, he has not done.
posted by gus on 10-19-2007 at 6:20 am
We just discovered the sideways screen trick on Dells this week. We promptly ran down to the networking cell (we’re pc maintenance) and did it to all of their machines.
posted by Devon on 10-19-2007 at 6:37 am
Not so much a crash as a scare (and I have pictures to prove it…)
I had some sort of fatal error screen pop up and my computer shut down. I completely blamed this on my (now ex) boyfriend because he had just downloaded google earth. I think it had a hand in ending our relationship. Anyway, the computer turned back on, but was not quite right… it was BLUE. Like the only actual color being used was blue, as if my computer had blue glass on the screen. You could see everything but it was all tinted blue. Try writing a paper for your senior seminar while your screen is blue. It really strains the eyes. It was something with my graphics card or something- because when we plugged in another monitor it was regular again. In any case I just switched with my mom’s old computer. This definitely caused me to buy an external hard drive.
It also spawned many jokes about how my computer was depressed, and how it had decided to join the Blue Man Group without consulting me.
posted by Kelly on 10-19-2007 at 6:42 am
If I am to understand that your computer screen flipped 90 degrees I may be able to help. Try pressing + + . Some video cards allow you to switch the direction of the screen for a reason unbeknownst to man.
Hope that helps!
posted by Witty Nickname on 10-19-2007 at 6:50 am
Apparently you edit out things that look like tags ctrl + alt + down arrow.
If it works can I have a T-Shirt?
posted by Witty Nickname on 10-19-2007 at 6:51 am
Jason! What about the board games contest?
good luck with your computer.
posted by Janet on 10-19-2007 at 7:03 am
Umpteen years ago, when I was in college, we were just making the transition to desktop publishing. Because we didn’t have enough Macs for everyone to write their stories on, we used ancient TRS-80s for word processing then transferred the stories over to the Macs for layout.
No matter how many times we told reporters “Back up your work frequently,” there’d still be someone who was feverishly racing to meet deadline who’d forget. Every so often, we would hear a little, electrical crackle… then a little puff of smoke would come up as a TRS-80 would die. Then a tortured scream would come up from the reporter, who would race to another machine to recreate everything he/she’d just written.
posted by Debi on 10-19-2007 at 7:12 am
its ok my 1 year old compaq is slower than my 8 year old gateway
posted by Corbin on 10-19-2007 at 8:03 am
I had a computer that contained both Microsoft and Linux operating systems. Supposedly separated… one day, Linux attacked Microsoft and every bit of writing done on my novel, and tons of wonderful photoshop editing were lost.
posted by Korin on 10-19-2007 at 8:17 am
Witty Nickname: I was able to right the screen with a few “control-shift-R” clicks. This was (I think) an old Word shortcut to bring up the Thesaurus. Guess I wasn’t in Word when I tried.
Janet: We’ll crown a winner as soon as my computer is back in action. I’m at Techserve in NY right now. I have a good feeling about this place. The people seem smart and nice.
I’m number 92. They’re on 85. I’m hospital-waiting-room anxious.
posted by Jason on 10-19-2007 at 8:19 am
Another scare story: A grad student I work with was practicing a presentation for an upcoming committee meeting. This involved a 60+ slide powerpoint full of pics, graphs, symbols, etc. summarizing his research to date. 10 minutes into his presentation, his computer mysteriously died. In the panic that followed, he admitted that ALL his research and data were on that computer. And not backed up. From the last 4 years. He turned white and nearly got sick. Finally, the computer responded to the power button and all was well. How a PhD candidate can be that stupid though is beyond me.
posted by tyler on 10-19-2007 at 8:46 am
My 2003 Compaq Presario notebook had been limping along for awhile, pretty much since 2003 actually. I knew it was only a matter of time until it died, and tried to back up my work frequently. Of course, as I was in the middle of a final paper for my English course, it died. Just shut down. Never to boot again. I hadn’t saved my research on my flash drive, so I had to go back to the library, find all the books I’d cited, look up every single web resource I used, and re-type three pages of the paper. I also lost nearly 2 gigs of music, and the un-edited versions of all of my digital photos. I can’t afford a new computer yet, so I’m using the old desktop my brother salvaged from his high school’s dumpster. I did invest in an external hard drive, and EVERYTHING I do gets saved. I also use Google documents to keep the final copies of all my school work on hand, wherever I go.
I wish I didn’t have to learn the “backup your work” lesson the hard way, but I’m glad I did.
Anyone want an 8 pound, 17 inch paperweight? Kidding, I donated it to the high school’s computer repair class to play with. After I removed the hard drive. That’s mine.
posted by Maggie on 10-19-2007 at 9:24 am
I was goofing off in iTunes a few months ago on my PC and accidentally deleted my entire library. The recycle bin overflowed and I ended up losing about 280 songs. It was pretty traumatic, but not as big a deal as most of these comments. :)
Also this week my sister’s house was broken into and her laptop stolen, at which point I realized that MY laptop was not backed up in any way (all my music, family pics/videos, etc) and that I would be beyond screwed if it got stolen. I backed up everything immediately.
posted by Bo on 10-19-2007 at 9:54 am
Sadly my new HP Desktop crashed earlier this year too. Thankfully they replaced the hard drive for free. I try and be religious about making backups of all of my data, but I still lost information–thankfully nothing too vital. Then my ISP decided to dictate what I could and could not store in my folder on their server (I’ve never had a problem with this for the last 10+ years and through several ISP’s…), and so I lost some data there as well, since they didn’t bother to notify me prior to deleting my files. I was using it as a location to save files I needed to access remotely.
After that I did some research and found a company called carbonite.com that allows you to store as much data on their servers as you need. The only catch at the moment is that it does not support USB and Ethernet drives, but they are looking to support that in the near future. So far I am very pleased with the service and it gives me peace of mind knowing that the data in between backups in saved externally. The rates are pretty reasonable too.
posted by Jon Georg on 10-19-2007 at 10:11 am
I learned this twice -
once, I was pulling an all nighter in college, working with a music program called Finale. I was working on a band compostion for a class and had about 8 hours STRAIGHT put into this project, include data entry and layout. At about 4 AM, I went to do something, and eveything on the computer stuck… and the last time I had hit the save button was probably three hours before. I not only lost layout, but entire parts (clarinet, violin, etc) I scrambled to get at least something onto a score to hand to my prof, but nothing of the quality that had been erased.
Second. I was working on a bunch of powerpoint presentations, nothing major each by themselves, but I had put in a few hours worth of work - about 30 seperate slideshows about 4 pages each. Mostly text (yes, they were songs for church if you must know). As I went to save one of them, I followed through, but the computer just stopeed. No big deal, I had only potentially lost one small presenation, right? Oh, NO!!! the computer starts to reboot when I hear the “Whirrrr-click-click-click” of a crashed hard drive… the laptop had died after about 6 years of use. I almost cried…
I am currently working on book and have some version in at least three places!
posted by Justin L on 10-19-2007 at 10:13 am
A couple of years back at work our computers went down for two days in January (which happens to be our busiest month of the year). This forced us to write out ever piece of inventory that left and returned. Doesn’t sound to bad, right? Try writing out 28 pages worth of inventory for each of the four departments at work. Then when the system came back up we go to type everything in line by line by line by line. I think I worked from 6am until 11:30pm that day trying to get everything done. It was horrible!!!
posted by Rick on 10-19-2007 at 10:23 am
My story is not nearly as traumatic as “I-lost-all-my-slides-for-my-grad-presentation”. But it is still a bit annoying. My 2 year old iBook starting making a noise that sounded much like high revving engine when ever it turned on. After a while it just stopped turning on. After researching this problem, I found out that if you put pressure right below the left apple/command button, the computer will turn on no problem. So I used a C clamp and hit the pressure point right on. This only works for about 10 minutes at a time. So I’ve had to go about moving all my (legal, as in paid for) music to my girlfriends mac. I’ve lost a majority of my pictures and some of my music won’t play. I’d estimate it at about a $100 loss in music and $400 loss in a laptop. Perhaps Apple laptops only have 2 year shelf lives.
posted by Alex on 10-19-2007 at 10:29 am
Last year I backed up 2+ years’ and 200gb worth of photos just to have that external hard drive corrupt itself and no recovery program can retrieve it. Now I have an all-new photo portfolio and multiple external hard drives.
posted by dave taylor on 10-19-2007 at 11:09 am
When I was in college (late ’80’s) I used an Amstrad word processor for writing my papers. I’m a terrible procrastinator in the first place, and that machine only made it easier to procrastinate longer. The machine had no internal hard drive, just a floppy drive (that used “special” disks) on the front for loading apps and saving documents.
Once I pulled an all-nighter working on a paper for some class, and got to a point where the documents disk was full. I was on a roll, and my 8am class was a mere four hours away, so I pressed on, thinking I’d finish the paper, track down another blank disk to write the document to, print it out and be off to class. When 7:30 rolled around, I still wasn’t done, but needed to get rolling anyway; the paper wasn’t for my first class so I figured I’d print it later. When I wasn’t able to find a new disk, I just left the machine on, figuring that it would be ok. What’s the worst that could happen?
About an hour after I left, my wife woke up, and noticed as she walked by the computer that I had forgotten to turn it off. So she did. Ouch. My paper evaporated.
That was pretty early in our marriage, and thankfully we realized that a paper (and four hours of work) were pretty miniscule in the big scheme of things, and now we can laugh about the incident. I was able to get a reprieve from my prof, picked up the doc from my last save, and was able to finish it in just a couple of hours (amazing what difference being well rested makes.)
posted by Dave on 10-19-2007 at 12:06 pm
I was being a good little computer user about 2 months ago and was backing up all my information onto my external HD. Everything was going well when a weird error came up on the screen. Long story short, it crashed. My entire life, or 250GB’s worth, was gone! After I calmed myself down, I was able to use a recovery program and get most of it back. So much for backing up your information; now I use RW-DVDs.
posted by Nina on 10-19-2007 at 12:15 pm
O.O You guys are scaring me!
Jason - I completely understand the feelings you are going through right now. A few months back my husband and I had to move 2+ hours away. During the whole ride, I was crammed with another person in the “extended cab” of my brother-in-law’s Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. (”Extended cab” = more like 1 1/2 cab, with teeny seats that flip down.) Anyhow, I *refused* to allow my PC to ride anywhere but crammed in the back with me. I cradled it the whole way, smashed up against the back of the passenger seat. My family thought I was nuts for insisting that the climate-controlled cab was much better for my ‘baby’.
*Runs off to backup hard drive*
posted by Rose on 10-19-2007 at 12:26 pm
This didn’t happen to me, but one time in college my friend was writing her 30-40-something page paper, and a virus from a floppy got into her computer and corrupted her files. This caused her to lose the last 15 or so pages she had to work on. She had to run back to the campus library to retrieve whatever scraps of notes she had in the garbage; she managed to pull it all off. Scary.
I had to replace my power supply and graphic card this year, but other than that, I always back up my files onto flash drives and CDs every year. If anything, I reformat every once in a while (maybe like every 2 years). For some unfortunate reason, a semester’s worth of work (which has been zipped) had been corrupted…it was considered my proudest semester, *sigh*.
posted by Lisa on 10-19-2007 at 1:56 pm
Well mine is not a disaster story (nothing was lost) but I think its pretty funny. One morning I went to use my Dell, and pressed the power button only to have it snap off and fly into the case. I retrieved the button, but there was no fixing it. So foolishly I turned the computer off, needless to say I was without computer for the rest of the weekend. Dell ended up replacing the parts with a better designed power button, but only after their phone support guy laughed at me and said “I’m sorry but this is strange and funny at the same time.”
posted by Scott on 10-19-2007 at 2:47 pm
Another tale not quite as upsetting as some previous ones, but I learned the hard way that you should ALWAYS back up your stuff in multiple locations. A few months ago, I went to back up some stuff at work on my thumb drive (which I had had for a couple of years), and it wouldn’t work. I tried it on several different computers, but it had just up and died. I later realized that a lot of work I had done in college, including my senior mathematics thesis and my honors senior colloquium thesis in physics, had been on that drive. I frantically searched every folder on my home PC, but for some reason I hadn’t saved any of that stuff on it. Long story short, all of that hard work is now gone. Hopefully, my physics prof. has a copy hidden away somewhere, but I doubt it. I invested in a new thumb drive and plan on purchasing an external HD so this never happens again.
posted by Erin S. on 10-19-2007 at 2:59 pm
Back in the Windows 3.1 days, I worked at a small engineering firm with one other engineer. He had our huge design project (weeks of work) on his machine, and I thought he was backing it up. What he was doing was just saving multiple copies on his hard disk.
Well, as you can see coming, the hard disk crashed. We were really screwed. I thought it couldn’t hurt anything, so I took the drive apart and watched it start up and fail. (I didn’t open the platter area, just the head controller area) I could see the head moving back and forth trying to find track 0. I figured the optical sensor went bad and off to the electronic supply store I went. The part I found was similar, but didn’t really fit. I wired it in and held it in place with my little finger. It didn’t work, but I kept trying. About the 30th try, it worked! I held as still as I could and the other engineer copied stuff off as fast as he could. We got the design and about half of everything else before something moved and it stopped working. We never got it to work again.
Backups must be on another media!!!
posted by zin on 10-19-2007 at 4:50 pm
My 1999 Dell laptop that has been upgraded a couple times is on its 3rd hard drive. I never seem to back up in time but I’ve been lucky and really haven’t lost much as I never put in a hard drive over 5G because I’m cheap. My desktop has a small main hard drive of 5G and a larger second internal of 25G neither original to the computer.
On my last crash we did surgery on the drive similar to what others have done and was able to get some stuff off so I’ve learned to keep anything important in 1 folder so its easier to get it all at once if I ever have to do that again.
With the smaller hard drive I have to back up pictures and files often to keep space free. I burn all pictures to CD on a yearly basis. All my current pictures are on a web site. Important documents end up on a web server or my flash drive as a back up.
I also re-format my hard drive every couple of years to get rid of the stuff I don’t use any more (games, programs).
I’m going to break my own rule here soon - I’m going to get a large 250G external drive to put music on. I really don’t want to loose that one but I hope with it being a seldom used drive it will last longer.
posted by Beth on 10-19-2007 at 6:49 pm
I have a story similiar to many others, but with a slightly different moral.. I was writing my senior thesis on a very old Mac in the biology lab that I was working in. I was dutifully backing it up onto a zip drive, when lo and behold, three days before my thesis was due, the computer stopped turning on. Multiple tech support guys later, it was officially dead. No worries, I had it backed up— Until I opened the files. It had saved all the backed-up text files with a random symbol between each letter…making it impossible to use. In the end, I ended up printing out all the corrupted text files, and my awesome labmates and I re-typed the whole thing (if you held the paper far enough away, you could kind of read it…) Anyways, don’t just back-up..try opening those files!!
posted by Ed on 10-20-2007 at 12:28 am