February 10, 2008

The bane of modern technology

I was hoping to utilise the holiday period to catch up on reading blogs and post some entries of my own, most outdated posts on Taiwan and Paris. I had also wanted to burn all my recent photos and other stuff into CDs for safekeeping. I was in the process of doing so earlier this week but I ran out of CDs. Then disaster struck!

I was reading through some saved documents on Pixart and Photobook as I had wanted to make one for some time now. Suddenly, my computer just hanged! Ctrl+Alt+Del didn't help, in fact another error message came up and the screen just won't budged. I decided to just power it off and waited a while to re-boot. It didn't work. I then removed the battery and waited a couple of minutes before retrying. No luck again. By then, I was already having cold sweats and frantically calling people to ask for help.

A friend came over to take a look and declared that my hard disk had gone on strike! Omigod! I've been struck by the bane of modern technology - corrupted hard disk! I'm not worried about my work-related stuff as they are all backed up in the server but all my personal stuff on my desktop - help! I've yet to back them up.

The next day, my friend placed my hard disk into an external drive casing which managed to read the data. I quickly copied some of the most important things like my unposted blog entries, photo collages and other personal documents. As the copying process was sometimes interrupted due to error in reading corrupted sectors of the hard disk, we had had to unplug the external casing several times and after a while, the computer can't read the external drive anymore. So I only managed to salvage part of my personal stuff and didn't managed to copy all my photos - recent shots of Yiu Yiu and photos taken in Siem Reap, Europe and Taiwan which I had wanted to make into a photobook.

Othniel, Chanel's hubby has offered to help (bless him!) but I can only see them when I get back to KL. I was told there are some softwares which can recover data from corrupted hard disk, or some shops which can make an exact copy of the hard disk at cut-throat prices. These are options, as I'd rather not bother my IS colleague to help me recover them, after all, these are my personal data. I've been having dreams about recovering the data the past two nights. Gosh! I really hope that things will straigthen out, and another reminder to invest in that external hard disk drive I've been procrastinating about.

4 comments:

jazzmint said...

oh dear...lucky the photos u manage to salvage...that reminds me time to backup my data

Chinneeq said...

u also know Chanel? what a small-small world :p

A Mom's Diary said...

Jazz, not really. The photos are the ones that got away.

Mummy to QQ, Chanel is my ex-colleague before she moved to the current company.

Anonymous said...

So sorry to hear about this. I can imagine that must have felt :P

Hope that Chanel's hubby can help you recover most of the stuff.

I recently lost ALL my photos to Wuyishan because I thought I'd copied them onto the external hard disk and so deleted them off the camera!!! Gone forever...

Now that I'm on my own i.e. company-less, I'm obsessed with backing up in 2-3 places. Get the external hard disk - I'm using Western Digital, if it helps.