A coworker's son had a computer that died. He was hoping that maybe I could salvage the data for him. I determined that the power supply was most likely bad.
Plan "A": It's a power supply with a few cables that and that it was of a newer variety that I don't have a spare for.
Plan "B": Swap the hard drive into another machine. Turns out the hard drive has a cable that I don't recognize. A little research and I am now introduced to SATA hard drives, but none of the spare part machines are new enough to accept a SATA drive.
Plan "C": Swap the hard drive into the family machine; after all we can always use an extra 250 GB. So, it's time to open up the family computer and see if there's a SATA port on that mother board... and here's where I make the mistake... as long as I've got the case open (and yes the power's off), I decide I ought to clean out the dust bunnies.
There IS a SATA port, so before installing the new drive, I power back on the computer, and it doesn't boot. Evidently dust bunnies are critical equipment.
We did have a system crash a couple of months ago, and I had to reinstall Windows, however this time the HDD that Windows was installed on is not being found by BIOS.
Bet I know what I'm doing this weekend...
4 comments:
Dust bunnies are generally known to hold the gremlins at bay.
The computer is alive again. It miraculously started working this morning. It won't be rebooted again until I get it backed up. I found a 2TB external USB drive for $120!
So is it backed up now?
Not backed up, yet, but we've got the gear to do it!!!
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