PerthNorg

How's this for an error message?

Early on Sunday morning, I was editing the latest episode of my podcast "Erk Pod" when the computer stopped responding. Initially I thought it might have been because of Firefox or the audio program I was using.

The Microsoft 3 fingered salute didn't work so I decided to power the computer down and try to reboot. Then the error message came that would prove to be fatal: "read disk error." The recommended solution was the 3 fingered salute but the same screen would appear.

I was lucky that I had an alternative way to access the interweb via my Nokia N95 so I was able to Google some solutions. One possible answer to the problem was a hard drive failure which I did not want to think about.

Fortunately I could get into BIOS and I read that the boot order was wrong. It was booting from a non-existent removable disk. I changed the boot order with no success. Tired and frustrated, I went to bed.

When I woke up later on Sunday, I was hoping that I could merely turn on the computer and everything would be OK. However, this was not to be the case. A few phone calls later with the answer of "hard drive error" did not fill me with confidence. Eventually I found my recovery disk and I inserted it, hoping that this step would work.

At this stage, I thought I'd lose everything on my disk (which I luckily had backed up the week before) but I was prepared for that. I thought that if I could start again, that would be fine. So I selected an option on the menu and that is when I had the big red ERROR message. The next option? It got to 98% and then the red error message again. Overall, it would not matter - any option led to the red error message.

On Monday I went back to the computer shop where I purchased the laptop from. Luckily for me, the computer was still in warranty as it was under 1 year old. The computer shop sent me to Asus who were located in the next suburb.

When I got to Asus I had to wait for about 15 minutes. It felt to me like being in an Accident & Emergency section of a hospital with an ill child. I handed the computer over and was told that it would take 3-4 days at the earliest to fix. I was rather pleased to get a phone call after 2 days to say that my computer was ready to pick up.

The fault? A hard drive failure.

I spent the afternoon reloading files onto the computer. It appears as though some programs weren't backed up and I have lost them but apart from that, everything is super. I have learned that backing up data is a good thing as is having a computer under warranty.

Source: http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/8905/lappieerror17022008m…