Monday 19 November 2007

I've had a disaster

Yesterday, switched on my laptop and got greeted with a black screen and error message saying windows could not load due to a missing or corrupt file. Looked at what I was supposed to do, and hadn't got a clue basically. It meant re-booting from the back up discs I made (and thank god I did) when I bought the pc last year. Trouble was, I couldn't get to the right bit to make them work. So I thought I'd take the lot down to the Computer shop in town, which is always open on a Sunday morning. Set off and had a nightmare journey, due to the road being closed because of a major accident, got diverted about 7 miles down little lanes, (along with about a hundred or more other cars, coming in either direction) Won't dwell on that only that a journey that normally takes about 12 minutes took 35. Got to the shop and it was SHUT! What was worse, is that I could see a bloke sitting in the back room doing something. So I rang the number, and could hear it ringing, and he wouldn't answer, so I didn't know if he was going to open or not, but I doubted it, this was about 11 am by then. So I popped in a shop, and made my way home, again round the scenic route.

I then spent a couple of hours setting up my old pc, which has been under the bed gathering dust for about a year, took ages to get online, so that I could ask for help on the forum I belong to. Long story short, eventually someone told me what I needed to do, and I managed to get the boot up discs to load. Thank god. Took about 30 minutes to re-install windows. Then I found out the bad news. It had wiped everything. I mean everything. All I had put on here in the past 13 months. All my photos, all my music, software, emails, you name it, it had gone. So someone else then tells me how to recover some of it. So I download that, and it runs and takes over an hour and saves thousands and thousands of images. Great I thought. It was then nearly midnight, I had been doing stuff with this about 12 hours in total. So I look and loads of what had been recovered were pictures I'd never taken or seen in my life. Then it tells me I have to purchase online with a credit card (I don't have one) to be able to save them. I was devastated, and ended up just closing the lot down and going to bed. Thank christ I do a blog, at least I have those photos still, and I did do a back up disc in June so all my important photos till then are safe, but the ones I'm most gutted about are some of my bird ones that I've taken this summer, and not put all on my blog for instance, or all my hedgehog ones on the cam as a record each night. I luckily still have lots on my memory cards (I've got about 5 of these with various things on) Still gutted though.

So today, I've been trying to get some stuff back on here. I've lost all my emails and contacts of course, I still have you guys from Yahoo, but all my other friends just have to text them and ask them to send me an email! All my important things too like banking stuff and bt and powergen, all gone. I just hope I can remember all the passwords and stuff. I couldn't get the wireless bit of my router to work this morning, and then the browser wouldn't work, you name it, I've had hassle with it. Sigh. I felt like killing myself yesterday to be honest. It was all my fault as usual, I couldn't wait and be patient, I could have taken it to the shop today and got it done, but instead I rushed into it, and probably chose the wrong option. Oh well, you live and learn. I suppose at least I've saved some money. Last time I had a laptop crash, it was £90 to get it fixed, that was about 3 years ago.

There is some good news today. Diddy boy has been out all day having a great time by all accounts. I left him outside when I went out as he was happy scratching around in the leaves outside, got home about 3.30 and expected to see him huddled and fed up, but he was still having a whale of a time. Whatever was wrong with him has gone away I think, he's just old, and wants to rest a bit more, but mainly he's as good as ever. He's eaten lots of proper stuff today, being outside, his little crop was full tonight. I bought him a pack of beansprouts, but he wasn't all that interested.

Dids getting his own worms

7 comments:

The Quacks of Life said...

poor jan. still good about diddy

cmk said...

I bought an external drive to use as a back-up because I am afraid of having the same thing happen to me. Of course, I actually have to USE the drive in order to avert a disaster...:) I'll get around to it--hopefully it won't be too late when I do!

Anonymous said...

i always use an external hard drive for photographs too. Ive seen others use it for music. Diddy looks terrific.

oldcrow61 said...

So good to see Diddy out and about. Sorry to hear about the trouble you had with the computer. If that happened to me the people in the white coats would have had to come and cart me away, lol.

Mary said...

Oh Jan what a shame.....I must admit I back up all my photos at least once a month and i also use Flickr to save some online in case i ever lost the lot.

Anonymous said...

Sorry Jan, hope things are going better now with all the computer problems. Diddy looks good!!

Karen said...

This is a timely reminder to me to back up my photos again!