After a bit of time mulling over the computer problem, I decided to buy an external housing for the poorly Sony SATA hard drive and see if it was still readable from Jan’s XP machine or the Capo’s Asus notebook. Would it be possible to recover the data? Both machines recognised it, but that’s as far as it went … they couldn’t read a thing from it. One last thing to try, then I would have to admit defeat and start over from scratch. Not a happy thought.
I loaded a demo copy of a program called ‘Recover my files’ …… a bit of a naff name I know, but it worked! It read the disk and recovered 95%+ of the data over 24 hours. I happily paid to unlock the demo version and within 48 hours had everything backed up to a new external hard drive. Things were looking up!
I reformatted and checked the hard drive for errors, then loaded a copy of the new Microsoft Windows 8 Release Preview – figuring that if the disk is suspect, it can’t do any more harm to play with a new version of Windows for a while. Somewhere along the line I’ll have to buy a new copy of Windows anyway, so why not see if the new version is any good …. it can’t be worse than Vista can it?
Well here I sit writing this post on a happy stable Sony Vaio with Windows 8 purring along smoothly. The system is faster and more stable, most of the programs I use have loaded with no issues and those that did were an easy fix. So fingers crossed that this little drama is over for now. Slowly I’m picking my way through the stored data and adding it back to the laptop, but it’s a slow old process ……
…… now to start doing regular backups!