This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 07/11/11
Phew, That Was A Close One!
This morning, in my customary Monday befuddlement after a lousy night's sleep, I unthinkingly cut the power to my PC before it had finished shutting down.
Powering it back up again at tea-time, it would load as far as that screen with the annoying blue dots moving across the bottom, but that was it.
Fired up my old Windows 98 machine to look for advice. Found some, but only after the old box had locked up a couple of times and had had to be given the three-finger salute.
Tried a repair from the XP disk; said I didn't have XP loaded. Tried getting into Safe Mode; stopped after one particular file. Tried the Repair Console (or whatever it's called) to rename the file which was apparently stopping the Safe Mode boot; denied me access. Finally, tried what I should have done in the first place if I had remembered my skills from my sysadmin days - ran Checkdisk; that got to 70-odd per cent before looping back to 50%. This happened a few times; I said a lot of naughty words.
Finally, Checkdisk completed and I trepidantly booted up. Yay!! Whoop! Whoop!. Three hours!
It was quite scary how panic-stricken I was starting to get. I mean, I had the old 98 rig, but that's old, slow and not entirely reliable (much like its owner).
I have now put a sticker over the computer power switch on the surge protector. I don't care if that means that there's power going through to the tower unit all bloody day, I'm not having that happen again!
