This last Saturday morning at 1.30am. I trudged into my bedroom to see my computer has hung, and the processor fan whirring uncontrollably. I thought a restart should do the trick, but to my horror….

Invalid System Disk, Insert System Disk and press any key to continue.

For the uninitiated, that translates into a hard drive failure. My 200GB Hard drive. Gone! About 25GB of Music, 30Gigs of documents and pics, another 20 gigs of videos, all gone. Tried again Saturday morning, to no avail. Funny thing, the hard disk would be detected off a cold reboot, but off a warm reboot, bam! it was gone.

Had no choice but to go and get myself another 320GB hard drive, and somehow hope that I could salvage the data by connecting the old one and copying the stuff over. Installed Windows Vista, connected the old drive, and as if by magic, I could see the old drive! Initiated the most awaited copy process of my life, and 2GB data transfer later, poof! old hard drive gone again. Many iterations and about 6 hours later, at 4am on Sunday morning, I had somewhat recovered most of the data, by painstakingly copying file by file over, shutting down Windows after every 2GB of data transfer, and restarting. By the evening, I was back on track, much to my relief.

The silver lining? The old disk is under warranty, which basically means I get a replacement disk.Why is that a silver lining? Because I would then have 320GB+350Gb (External) + 200 GB = 870GB of drive space, with little or no idea what I’d be doing with it.

I’m open to ideas.

Related to this, I wrote on

  • No Related Post