It is in the midst of adversity that we have the greatest opportunity for learning. I had the opportunity to learn quite a bit last night. I cannot remember the last time I saw a blue screen of death that I could not fix (I think it was back in Windows NT days) but it happened last night. How a computer works perfectly in the morning when I shut it down and then completely crashes 11 hours later after not being used is a mystery.

One new discovery I had was that Dell does not provide recovery disks with their new computers or even a boot disk. The manual says to go to your Windows desktop if you need to reinstall Windows or see online support for other recovery options (both a problem when you cannot boot up). I was glad I had my work laptop to conduct some research. This is when I learned that there is a recovery partition on the drive but it restores the original software (most of which I had deleted) and wipes all data. If I had purchased the Dell data recovery option, I would not have had an issue...

I did find a diagnostic partition and ran every test I could find on both drives (I run a Raid array, but it is not the mirror version because I opted for speed, unfortunately). Both drives passed all tests so, it did not seem to be a hardware failure but there was clearly some form of corruption. (There might yet be some bad sectors but I am not far enough in the process to have run the disk check again).

After several hours of effort, I reluctantly hit the restore function, expecting that flaws in the disk would probably not allow it to function. The recovery worked perfectly and restored the operating system to its original pristine glory along with all of the 30+ trial versions of software I had tediously deleted.

Another element of new knowledge I gained last night was the fact that Microsoft has issued a lot of updates in the last 10 months. When they come a little at the time they are not too noticeable but when you have to download more than 60 at one time, it is painful to get them all installed. And these updates do not even include MS Office because I have not yet reinstalled that product. And MS is not the only one with a lot of ongoing product updates, my anti virus software had 30 megs of updates too.

Finally, I learned that I don't know what I don't know. As I write this post, I am trying to jot down what I have lost off my drives. I have an external network drive at home and have back-ups of most photos and, most importantly, my dissertation but it is not big enough to auto back-up everything. I know have lost: a few purchased iTunes files and a bunch of CDs I ripped this weekend (music prior to that is also on another computer but I had cleaned all the metadata up recently), my emails that were not still on a server (most of them). I also lost two family video projects but fortunately I have the original tapes.

I am going to try some recovery software tonight to see if anything is still there that can be salvaged so there is more learning ahead!

Meanwhile, my son was having fun with the new Warcraft expansion that came out yesterday and urging me to hurry up and get on the game. *sigh* maybe this weekend...or is that being too optimistic?