At work, i now have the privilege of just focusing on programming without having to worry about supporting users when their computers don't work I did quite a bit of that when i first started there but i quickly got sick of telling people to reboot. I'm out of practice at troubleshooting problems with applications that i didn't write so i find myself calling the help desk to find solutions rather than wasting my time with it. However once people know you as a "computer guy," they think you can solve any PC problems.
I got a call today from my old boss at JA, Mr Dieleman. He was the president of the local JA office when i was just a student in the program and he's the one that asked me to come back as a member of the JA staff to run the evening company program. The last time i saw him was about five years ago. He's an brilliant man and i always looked up him. I'm in his debt for the many great opportunities he opened up to me, so when his voice mail asked me to call him back because he was having "major computer troubles" i didn't think twice. I at least had to try to help.
I picked up his troubled machine and took it into the office to see what i could do. He has XP Home edition installed on the computer, but when i turned it on, nothing came up. It wouldn't even start in safe mode. I tried booting from the Windows CD in recovery mode and when i tried to list the files on the c: drive, it came up with absolutely nothing. I tried running the XP install hoping i might be able to do a repair, but the install program informed me that "the partition is either too full, damaged, unformatted, or formatted with an incompatible file system." The only thing it would let me do was format the drive. Before i permanently wiped everything off the drive, i plugged my error message in the goolge search box in a hail mary attempt to save the files on the computer.
I found a page that seems to make these symptoms sound like the result of a virus. Apparently the files may still be recoverable by sticking the hard drive into another working computer in slave mode. Luckily i had some help from the guys at work who are more hardware savvy than i to accomplish this task. We got it all wired into an old retired work box and amazingly enough it worked! I copied over the contents of his "my documents" folder to the hard drive of the surrogate box.
I figured all i had to do now was reinstall Windows XP and i'd be all set. However, i received another surprise. When i returned the hard drive back to its original machine, it initialed some sort of scan disc that it hadn't been able to do before and just started working again. Somewhere in the computer parts juggling act i performed, the bug died.
Most people would be happy with the end result; but these are the kind of things that scare me the most. Now i really have no idea what caused it, exactly what fixed it and how to prevent it from happening again. At least by getting the machine running again i was able to increase my hardcore geek credibility score by a few points. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the same problem doesn't pop up again any time soon.
Posted by Matthew at May 29, 2004 12:13 AM