Hard drive failure.
I’ve had a PC of some kind for years now and, since about 1986, all of them have had hard drives. Yes, the first ones were only 10Mb or so but in those days, with dos as an OS, that was more than adequate. In all that time I have had only one drive fail and that was on a Mac II back in about 1989. Of course it happened at a critical moment and I had next to no decent backup. Hey ho, I got round it after a lot of swearing and a fair amount of repair cash – drives were expensive back then!
Anyhow, last week, mum reported a few problems with the PC I gave her a couple of years ago. Turns out, Windows 98 wouldn’t start at all. After the normal checks, I found the windows directory was screwed somehow and totally unreadable (well most of the time anyway!) I ran a few diagnostic checks but was left with the fact that no data from that section of the disk could be reliably recovered. The drive in question is a Western Digital 20Gb, with about 3-4 Gb used. The cost to replace something like that today is about £30 so it is hardly worth fighting to restore it especially as the PC is used purely for web browsing and email.
Even though I have had just 2 hard drive failures to date, it scares me to think that I now have at least 600Gb of drives which I regularly use and rely on. One failure today would be much more of a headache than it was back in 1989 even though I have backup copies of everything.
Drives are cheap (400Gb = c£200), it’s the recovery that’s expensive.
Mum now has a nice shiny new drive with XP installed and just about everything apart from her old emails and her IE favourites restored, total cost? £0, I had a spare 20Gb drive sitting in my spares box, after all it’s not big enough for any machine I use these days!
How times have changed. 20Gb? I used to dream of 20Mb!
Filed under: Uncategorized
