There is no fun quite like that of dealing with an older PC that won’t run correctly. A myriad of possible problems present themselves before a diagnosis can be made and all of them require significant time to test. So my day is blown as I’ve been dealing with my father’s balky PC.
Thankfully, Knoppix boot DVD’s and CD’s allow one to poke into everything possible and after hours of CHKDSK follies I found the problem.
Sadly, the boot drive has developed bad sectors and Windows XP is unusable. Fortunately, the backup utility I installed on it to silently back things up has archives from a month ago before running out of space on the second drive. A month’s amount of data is lost and I need to see if the trial version of Acronis TrueImage will restore it when we get a new drive.
Of course my father hasn’t backed up any of his documents, so I’m shutting the thing down to prevent further data loss. This is why backups are a must.
I just wish I’d paid more attention to where he stood on backups. It will be questionable whether the last month’s data can be salvaged.
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