As Feared

[kevin_standlee]

This morning, my personal laptop refused to boot, with the "A Disk Read Error has occurred" black screen, which is at least different from the more typical failure mode of just a blinking black cursor. Even more curiously, it won't boot from the bootable CD-ROM either.

I have another computer — my work machine from which I have indeed been working. But this is highly annoying, particularly as I ordinarily would be able to just swap drives to the backup and recover my data. I probably can still get at the data on my personal machine, since this error normally doesn't affect anything but the drive's ability to boot, and I can still get work done, but it's still annoying. I really don't want to have to drive back to Fremont if I can avoid it.

Comments

[ericlarson.livejournal.com]

Kevin, I do live fairly close to you. Do you want to arrange things so that I could ship things to you in the event of this happening again?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Since I expect to have to move in a few months, it probably won't make much of a difference, but thank you for the offer. What I think I'll do after recovering from this setback is to leave one of the backup clones in Fernley. Since they're on a rotation-of-three, that shouldn't be too much trouble.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

can you over-night a key to Eric and not have to drive back THIS time? (assuming willing)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I could, but it's not quite urgent enough to justify it. I have one working computer. I even have another older machine here that I might be able to get working again. This is more annoying than anything else. Heck, if it was a critical failure, I'd be on the road to Fremont in a few minutes after my next conference call ended. The very fact that it's a holiday week makes this slightly less troublesome, just irritating.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Huge sympathies. My laptop crashed a week or so back. I managed to restore it, but the hard drive sounds like a wonky gearshift as it launches, so I'm not 100% optimistic for its future.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

That seems a little strange. As I noted, when my little netbook died the 'black screen blinking cursor' death after OryCon it booted up just fine on a Knoppix disk. Whatever the disk error is, it seems more thoroughly dead than the usual problems. I hope you recover all your data easily...

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

The drive is completely readable as an external (non-booting) drive. It just won't boot. But I agree that not being able to boot from the CD-ROM is very strange. It won't boot from the CD-ROM even if there is no hard drive at all installed.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I expect you long ago set the BIOS to boot from other things, so I don't know what else to tell you. That's odd. I'm glad you've got all your data, though!