Well, we might be silent for a little while. Last night, Mel’s computer developed a hard drive problem and won’t boot up.
Pray we get it fixed somehow, because otherwise we’re going to have a rough summer. A lot of stuff we need to be able to use is on that computer — basically we were planning to use it to keep our life back East still running while we’re in the West.
Also, the hard drive has our pictures — several hundred of them — on it. For some of the files, we have no other copy.
If there are any computer gurus out there with suggestions, the error message appears before Windows finishes booting up, even in Safe Mode. Error Code 0F00:0244 Msg: Block 656414: Uncorrectable data error or media is write protected. I’m reading that it’s a bad hard drive sector, but if someone has another idea or a suggestion about how to get our data off the drive, I would be very interested.
You guys are still out on your trip right? I can probably get all your files off that hard drive if we can arrange to meet sometime where I can look at the laptop.
I’ll have to take the hard drive out of the laptop, but should be able to retrieve the files fairly easily.
Email me if I can be any help whatsoever.
Me again! Meg reminded me of your itinerary, and I realize now that my first post won’t help much.
Try getting an external enclosure kit for a laptop hard drive. You can pull your old disk out, install it in this, and hopefully pull most of your files off. You’ll probably need to get a replacement HDD for your laptop.
It sounds like the bad sector is in the boot sector, so hopefully your files are all intact.