For quite some time now I've had an occasional boot-up problem with my old—and I do mean old!—PC. I'm pretty sure the hard drive is having issues because sometimes the machine might not boot up on first try, instead telling me it can't find a bootable hard drive attached. When that happens I just hit the hard reset button and it has always come up the second time (quite often with the accompaniment of popping sounds coming from the drive as it gets spinning up to speed).
A few minutes ago, though, it took about five tries before I finally got things up and running. That's the first time it's repeatedly failed to that extent. I was very seriously beginning to suspect (and dread) that the drive had indeed finally died on me, but I managed to get it up and running finally.
I checked the drive for errors, defragged, and am hoping that will help, but I have my doubts. One of these days it will finally fail on me, but I've just been riding it for as long as it'll keep chugging away.
Anyway, just thought I'd mention it because if I have to install a new hard drive (or even upgrade to a new machine) it could be a while before I get back to blogging stuff. I'm still hoping that maybe it was just some momentary glitch, though, so I will wait and see how things go (with the traditional finger crossing for luck).
P.M. UPDATE: I shut things down for about an hour, then tried to boot up and it worked. Obviously that's good, but it's probably not the best test. A better indication of machine status will be whether or not it boots tomorrow after being off all night.
A.M. UPDATE: Well, the PC passed the next-morning test and booted up fine. I was mildly surprised. So now I'm cautiously hopeful (not quite optimistic) that maybe the incident was some sort of weird glitch and maybe now it'll go back to just being persnickety on less frequent occasions with the hard reset button doing the trick. Still, though, if activity around here falls off at anytime (not that I'm a whirlwind posting machine normally) there's a good chance it could be due to machine problems.
2/4 UPDATE: Still booting up fine ever since. If I had known, I wouldn't have even bothered with this post, but I just wanted my three regular readers and any commenters to be aware of the possibility of extended inactivity around here if my drive was indeed gasping its last.
2 days ago
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4 comments:
Had a Mac iBook that behaved that way for a long time, then the machine began to slow dramatically. Finally, it just wouldn't boot anymore, and a booting from CD, it took 6 hours to run a full backup. Diagnostics showed the drive had developed lots of media errors, and the speed was due to the drive frequently recalibrating itself.
Do yourself a favor, and get an external drive (if this machine supports it) as soon as possible, and get everything of value off your hard drive.
Recovery after the fact is a bigger pain than before.
Good luck...
Thanks for the tip. I already have a second hard drive for my valuable data and even my not-so-valuable data files. Plus I back up the really, really important stuff regularly on writable media starage devices. That's why I haven't been in too big a rush to do something about this, instead taking a wait-and-see attitude.
So far so good in that things seem to be fine since this significant stand-out glitch a few days ago. I remain hopeful that I may yet be able to get more valuable service out of what has been a very good machine over the years. And when it's working properly it still more than adequately meets my modest computing needs.
If the hard drive dies anytime soon, I'm not so sure I won't just replace the drive as opposed to going out and buying a shiny new toy which in reality will provide only modest gains in usefulness as far as what I tend to do.
When broadband internet service becomes available in my immediate area at a reasonably affordable price (compared to what I know others get it for elsewhere), then I may very well splurge for a new machine altogether because I would then have access to so much more fun stuff on the web, space-hog stuff that would be worth saving and thus would necessitate greater connection speeds and local storage capacity.
I just leave home a half hour earlier than I used to. Now the drive isn't so hard anymore.
Uh, not that kind of "hard drive" Olivia, but I suspect you knew that... ;-)
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