When Computers Quit

[dickandlois]

Well ! After weeks of trying to get the old computer working, I have slowly been getting different systems up and running.

No joy when one is totally floating in never never land. Living in a little black box and not from note pads has its down side for sure !!!!

Still need to get some drivers loaded for most of the extra items and add ons I have, but internet service is working and with some help from FMCA IT dept. just logged on to the Forum for the first time in weeks.

Still need to get some of the nice little items like spell check going, then on to reloading all my file folders and the information they contain from the back up drive.

Realy hopping that they are all safe on the external hard drive - got my fingers crossed.

So if I'm slow getting back to members asking about questions and that information is hiding somewhere on the drive. I just hope that with all the members using this resource, some one can supply the needed answer(s).

Happy and Safe travels with very few problems to all.

Rich.

[huffypuff]

I know about computers as I have to have several in the shop, one for customers and accounting, another for reprogramming vehicles and an Android for diagnosing vehicles, I have 2 other Android smart phone and note pad to keep in touch. Then in the house there is 2 computers and the wife using using 2 Androids smart phone and kindle fire. Life use to be simple.

Good luck what you have to contend with your computer.

[kaypsmith]

Rich, glad you are OK, was wondering the other day where you were. You should have called me.

Kay

[wayne77590]

Hi Rich,

All may not be lost. First course of action would be to go by an external hard drive enclosure. As mechanical as you are you can remove the hard drive from the "dented" computer and put it in the enclosure, plug it into a USB port and copy the information from the old drive to a newer drive. That is of course that the old hard drive just had some glitches on it and is not completely locked up. You may have a couple files that you cannot recover as they are the ones most likely causing the problem.

I'm assuming you have a PC and not a MAC. As such, with a PC files are not kept in a contiguous state on the hard drive. Example would be if you had a 200mb file and other smaller files and then saved a 500mb file it would write the blocks to each of the lesser files in a non-contiguous format. So, every so often PC users should run the utilities to manage the hard drive. This would take all the files and make then contiguous. Speeds ot the retrieval process besides helping the file system.

Barring that, you could take it to a computer repair, Best Buy comes to mind, and ask them to recover your data files for you. It takes some special software to recover some of the files.

Although you mentioned you had an external hard drive, and I'm again assuming that you stored your data files on that hard drive, there are times when programs just automatically save files to the internal hard drive. It is possible that you could have a few data files on the bad hard drive. With that in mind, if you think you have any sensitive files on the old hard drive and it is really not going to relinquish its data, take a hammer to it just to be safe.

Wish I were closer to your location.

p.s., Don't copy applications (program files) as many of them may not work because the registry settings will not transfer when you just copy. Of course, there is a way of saving the registry and putting it on a different computer - but it's not worth it. Just reload the program files.