My Computer Tip!!

This week, while on my computer, I clicked on a FB email that apparently had a virus or malware attached to it.  As soon as I clicked on the link from my email, my computer shut down and started rebooting...but, as it was going into Windows, I got the BSOD and it started rebooting.  I went through all the fixes and none worked.  My last resort was to format my hard drive and re-install Windows, which would mean all my important files would be lost.

But, some time ago I bought 2 smaller hard drives and installed my Operating System on each of them.  This would enable me to pull the defective hard drive and at least get back on line.  I do keep these spare drives updated as well with all Windows updates...doesn't take long. 

So what I did was take one of these working hard drives, made it my primary and changed the pin settings on the defective hard drive to slave or cable select.  The bottom line, after I booted into Windows, I immediately got a screed that showed my working Wins was checking the bad drive for missing and corrupt files....and boy were there a ton of them.  After about 10 mins. of replacing or deleting all these files, my computer went back to the working hard drive. Once in it, I clicked on My Computer.  Then, the defective drive came up with all my files still there.  I immediately transferred them to my boot drive and shut down my computer.   

Then, I made the defective drive my boot drive and left the other drive off.  Low and behold the once defective drive booted back into my Windows Operating System and has been running with NO problems for a couple of days...knock, knock on wood.  

Summary:  Having an extra drive with your operating system on it can be a life saver for getting back on line, quickly.  And using that drive as your primary and hooking up your defective drive as a slave drive may be a fix that many don't know about.  It sure beats formatting your defective drive and re-installing your Operating Systems and loosing all your data.  This should work with both a desktop and a laptop.

Of course the best way to protect your data is to either back it up or use Carbonite off line services.  

Posted via email from Kleerstreem's Posterous