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July 17, 2005
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Disaster's near miss

Sun Jul 17, 2005, 9:39 AM
Friday afternoon, I started my PC and when I came back it was shut down. Assuming a momentary lapse of memory I switched it on again. The boot screens passed and the little cursor started to wink, then went out, and my PC shut down.

Panic!

I tried to get into Safe Mode but couldn't. I booted from my W98SE CD and it seemed my hard disks and data were still there.

Instant relief.
But how to get at it..?
After trying umpteen different things I decided to sleep on it for the night.

The next day I located my XP Pro disk and copied all of my old Windows directory to my E: drive. Or so I thought...

I fired up the XP disk, wiped the old C: disk, and watched everything install like the proverbial charm. Once XP was up and running, I decided to chuck a whole bunch of applications I hardly ever used, and started installing the stuff I needed. FireFox was item number one...but...where id my favourites go?
Thunderbird came next and it offered to open a fresh account for me when I fired it up. Hmmm... I could understand that, but...where was my mailbox? Oh wait, that must be in my old Windows folder.

Sadly it wasn't. Neither were my bookmarks and my Photoshop Album catalog...  It turned out the XCOPY32 had copied across about half the directories of the old windows folder, but not the bits I wanted most. I took a deep breath, sighed and continued installing stuff.

At least my photos were still there, and that, after all, is what counts :)

So now I'm running XP, and so far: I'm pleased with it. It even looks as if some applications, like PSE2, actually work better under XP.

____________________________________
1985 - Spain/France; 1986 - Alpi Orobico; 1988 - Spanish Meseta; 1989 - Pyrenees; 1991 - Turkey; 1992 - Egypt; 1993 - Eastern USA; 1995 - Syria and Jordan; 1996 - India and Nepal; 1999 - China and Tibet; 2000 - Friesland; 2001 - Mexico and Guatamala; 2003 - Ardennes; 2004 - Delmarva and Idaho; 2005 - Los Angelos.
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:iconmarie-aude:
Seems like there was kind of virus with these problems. Different reasons, same results... lost all my mails, and all my favorites... ans some pictures (luckily just scans I can redo)

:)
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:iconjaydehawk:
I haven't found any disclaimers on the scanner's website, but it was definitely caused by something in the update. Oh well, luckily the loss was fairly unimportant. I'm glad you didn't lose more, to lose photo's permanently would be a real shame . :)
Reply
:iconevyto:
oh,it's awful having pc problems!
espescially if you're a pc maniac:pc:
Reply
:icontwodogs239:
~twodogs239 Jul 17, 2005   Photographer
Did I hear you say windows 98 :faint: Glad you got up and running again.....personal computer problems always give me the shivers and has me reaching for a pile of floppys ...opps DVD's to back things up on. =)
Reply
:iconjaydehawk:
SE :p
W98SE: lovely, little and fairly stable. I also figured out what went wrong when my girlfriend's PC exhibited similar symptoms. It turned out the auto-update of the virus scanner was faulty and caused the system to fail when loading the resident scanner.
So...I probably didn't have to go through all the hassle I did, but at least I now have a clean system. ;)
Reply
:iconwhooptishit:
Horrible, horrible technical problems. Egh. I'm glad the photos were intact. I lost most of my photos in December when i accidentally deleted them and never came back....well though that was due to pure stupidity. I sure did learn a lesson...hurumphnut.
Reply
:iconjaydehawk:
Sorry to hear you lost your photos... :hug:

Mine's really silly, as I since found out what actually went wrong: a faulty software update. Oh well.
Reply
:icongilli:
Oh Jay, what a disaster :hug: At least you have your photos ...

If there's anything you need that I might have, let me know.
Reply
:iconjaydehawk:
Thanks :)
:hug:

I think I got the important bits :)
Reply
:icongeodelady:
very sorry to hear about your problem:hug:
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