Today has not been a good day for me, computing-wise. First, I effed up my WordPress installs. Then, I came home to the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” on my personal laptop. I suppose this was to be expected, I think it’s 4 or 5 years old now. For the past few months, it needed to be on AC power to run at all – the battery didn’t work any longer.
From my googling, I’ve determined that unplugging the computer haphazardly, without turning it off, first, is probably what killed it. Although, I’d been doing that for quite some time, too. In any event, I’ve got 5 years worth of pictures, movies, music, documents, e-books, etc., that I’d rather not lose, if I can avoid it.
I cannot get past the startup screen, it won’t boot and I cannot locate my Recovery CD, although I hear that it won’t work since I’ve probably upgraded to SP2 and once you do that, the old Recovery disc doesn’t work. I’m going out on a limb, and I’m going to try using a bare bones Linux boot CD that I’m going to create myself, boot from that (since I was able to change the BIOS) and hopefully I can transfer necessary documents via USB. This will be painful, because I have a 40GB HDD, and only a 2GB Flash Drive.
I am open to suggestions, if anyone has them!
I don’t really feel like shelling out $$$ for a new computer, but I also don’t feel like spending money on an external HDD just to warehouse all of my crap (the work PC is not mine, per se, plus, it’s HDD is pretty well filled up, too.)
Oh shit, David! Assuming that you’re not pressed to recycle the bunked machine right now, there are tools — I am just pressed to find them. I’ve been perhaps uncharacteristically lucky in dodging from internal to external hard drive for so many years that it’s never hit me this way.
Please post another thing when you can… if it’s really only 40/2 you have to worry about, you’re not so bad off, and will probably recover everything. If it gets awful, I’ll dig deeper.