Daddy Wears Slippers to Work — book blog about working at home

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It’s a fact of life, sometimes you’re going to need to troubleshoot and fix computer problems on your own.  Working from home means that you don’t have IT at your beck and call, so you’re flying solo baby!  On Thursday I had one of those charming "oh sh*t" moments and I thought you’d like to learn from it.

I’m going to outline the what happened first, then tell you the things that I did to get back up and running within a few hours.

So what happened?  You know I should have known that something was up because my laptop wasn’t hibernating right.  It would get about 1/4 into the restoring process then have to delete the restoration data and reboot normally.  Now, given that hibernation in XP can be wonky, I didn’t give it too much thought (though I had run chkdsk recently … more on that later).

Okay it started innocently enough.  My laptop froze doing a search with Windows Desktop search.  So I pushed and held the power button to shut ‘er off and reboot.  Now, generally, okay most of the time, doing this while the hard drive light is on (therefore active) is a bad idea, but I was impatient so I did it anyway (file under knowing enough to be dangerous).  When I turned the machine back on I got the nice HP Invent logo (good), then Windows XP (good) and I walked away.  Well, XP never loaded and in fact it was just stuck in a boot failure.  Windows wasn’t loading, no way no how.  Ugh.

So here’s the first lesson: don’t panic.  Yeah, easy to say, but don’t.  Panic makes you do really stupid things.  This isn’t a time-sensitive operation.  Your files aren’t going to self-destruct if you don’t get Windows back up and running ASAP.  Step away, try to relax, and think.  This is a really good time to find the install CDs that came with your machine; you’re going to need them.

Second lesson: have a backup plan.  I didn’t panic because I had a solid backup plan.  All my important e-mail routes through GMail.  All my RSS feeds synced with Attensa online, all my files (okay 95% at this point) backed up with Carbonite (thank you again!), contacts with Plaxo.  I knew that if worst came to worst, I could manage for a day or two if my machine was down.  By putting and using online services you can use the kids computer and friend’s computer, even a Internet cafe, to keep things running.

How did I get out of this jam?  This is where those install CDs that came with your machine come in.  So, you need to put the Windows re-install CD in and boot from that.  Many machines are configured to boot from CD if one is in there (a bit of a security hole, but convenient when this happens).

Once you’ve booted from the CD, well not things get fun.  You think you want to repair Windows right?  So you hit R to get ot the Recovery Console.  The problem with the Windows set up is that the Recovery Console is just not friendly.  Heck it’s just a command prompt.  You sit there staring at the prompt wondering "what the f*ck do I do now?".  This is what I did and pretty much all I figured I knew I could do without making things worse.  I ran check disk (chkdsk).  The command to type is chdsk /r (for repair).  For me it took about an hour and a half to run through chkdsk.  What is does if check the disk for problems and fix them.  You need to do this to have any hope of this going smoothly and getting back up and running.  I suggest getting a couple good DVDs going in the player, just so you’re not sitting and staring at the screen.

Once chkdsk is done, type exit and the machine will reboot.  Boot from the CD again and now you’re going to do my new favorite Windows fix, the non-destructive reinstall of Windows.  Fred Langa wrote about this in June.  I made a PDF of the article for posterity.  I’m not going to go through all the steps here, Fred does a great job of that.  Once it is going, just sit back and relax.  Let it work it’s magic.  For me, that’s all it took.  One episode of CSI and one DVD (Planet of the Apes, new version) later I was back up and running.

Let me recap the lessons here:

• Plan for the worst ahead of time which means:
  • Backup frequently.  Carbonite is my fav.
  • Know how to get into your e-mail through the web
  • Sync your RSS feeds online somewhere so you can check them
  • Know where your Windows reinstall CDs are, all the time (usually there are two of them)
• When it does happen, don’t panic
• I know what I’m doing because I’ve read about it beforehand, but if you feel that you’re getting in over your head, call your computer maker’s tech support.  Remember if you’re not sure what to do, just don’t.

That’s about it.  In a few hours I went from an unusable machine to being back up and running again without losing any files.  My machine seems to be running better now too.

Tags: windows crash, fixing windows xp, home tech support

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