Suddenly, there was nothing left on the memory card. A months worth of video and photos was gone. I started on a mission to recover those files from the SD card with some software I found online. Most of that software I learned was only free to the point of finding my files. To actually have and to hold my files again would cost me around $40. I hunted down and started using some freeware. With the freeware, scanning a sixteen gig SD card took almost twenty hours.
A day without my phone. . . that's a blog for another day. I survived it, barely.
At the end of a long day, I was unable to recover the videos I wanted most from my phone, but I did get more than 90% of my photos recovered. I wanted one more try at getting my videos back before I moved on. I started by looking around on some sketchy sites for some more software. During that time, Cari got an email from a friend on Facebook that turned out to have been sent by a virus. The computer started acting a bit weird, and every Google search result I clicked on became an ad. Now I was starting a new battle. The phone was nearly complete, but not back in my hands yet, the computer software was slow and awkward, and now I was trying to remove a stupid virus. The computer had turned evil. Did the virus come from a foul piece of software I found or from Cari's friend? It didn't matter. The computer chuckled at my every move to try and fix it.
I just about had the virus killed when the computer showed some control in this war and shoved a blue screen of death at my face. I restarted the computer and Windows Vista would not load. Things were getting worse. A few more restarts and I realized that safe mode was useless. I used the Windows disc to try and recover with no success. In all of my efforts, I even played around in the Bios trying to coax something to load, the only thing that I could get was a blue screen describing a crash dump. Yeah, "dump" is the key word. My computer was taking a dump on me. A re-install of Windows Vista seemed to be the only solution and it was asking for me to format the hard disc.
That meant losing everything on the drive! I felt sick to my stomach. First of all, all the photos I had just spent twenty four hours recovering from the phone were about to be deleted again. My technology world was collapsing around me.
Cari heard my weeping and came into the office to find me sitting on the floor next to my chair. Skipping past the parts of me crying and holding my computer through the night, the next part of this story is coming home from Best Buy with a new computer.
Before the new computer could be powered on I took a few minutes to pillage my crashed computer for parts. I took my video card and power supply from that computer and injected them into the new computer.
The parts that came out of the new computer went into the old one and made a very nice family computer for the kids to use.
Three quick notes:
1. I was able to recover the data from the hard drive of my computer with just a few exceptions.
2. The above photo was a step not described here, which was pillaging an even older computer to finalize the family computer and putting the oldest one to the computer grave yard forever.
3. The Droid is working great again. Turns out an evil programmer over at Slacker Radio caused the memory card to get deleted and it has since been fixed (probably).
It turns out that not all computers are evil. Just my old computer. It was running on Vista, so I am going to go ahead and narrow down the evilness to Vista. Exorcism complete.
4 comments:
Phones are for making calls.
Cameras are for taking pictures.
Lesson learned? :P
Aaron you are living in the past. Having so much in one device is incredible. In fact, I just typed this comment from the Droid.
I'm seriously considering a mac for my next computer. They seem to have a lot less issues like you described above. My problem with Macs in the past is that they were incompatible with everything. That issue seems to have been resolved now.
Ugh... My mom's computer is showing similar evil behaviors. I have been putting off going over to work on it because I am afraid of what I might find. I have, however, scheduled the exorcism for Thursday. I figure it's the least I can do for the nice lady that raised me.
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