… that my WinXP box wouldn’t load the profile, today, that three system restores wouldn’t fix it, and now that the chkdsk /r has been running for three hours? It’ll get up to 75%, then backslide to 50%, rinse/repeat.
I really don’t want to have to do a Windows reinstall. Yes, it’s all backed up (twice, in different places), but, man…
Update: after 3 hours (not hperbole) it finished, reporting that it had found and fixed errors. And it fixed my little problem, so I’m back in business. The business of not providing updated, thoughtful comment to the blog, that is.
Sounds like you need a new hard drive…
You should write a new Mac commercial.
By a server grade box with hot-swapable drives. HP’s been reliable for us.
http://www.waittimes.blogspot.com
You might want to get spinright from http://www.grc.com (iirc?) it works wonders for recovering HD, but it does sound like your drive is failing, the best thing to do would be to backup what is important, and then replace the failing drive ASAP, if not sooner.
supermicro makes some great IDE/SATA/SCSI drive cadges (normaly 5 in 3) if you have 3 free ‘cd-rom’ bays you can put one of these in your system and that makes drive swapping alot easier.
Hope this helps.
Yes, your hard disk is developing bad sectors. Things will go south from here quickly (and not end up in Cozumel). Sorry, Doc, but you will have to spend some cash. Personally, I would recommend purchasing a Mac and Parallels, and then installing XP in Parallels and restore your XP data to that.
Good luck!
Three words: USB hard drive.
I support a LOT of traveling users, and we outfit them with these, with the proviso that the users do regular backups at night. When a laptop drive dies, we swap in a new one and restore, and we’re back and working.
If the user hasn’t done a backup while they’re on the road for a month? Their backup will be a month back. Way it works.