A couple of weeks my main laptop started to act up one afternoon and had trouble booting up. I had backed up the important files a couple of weeks before, but in the mean time I had a lot of work that I had not saved. After I got home I decided to try it one more time and sure enough it booted up OK and I decided to backup the new data to an external drive...unluckily, the better half had taken it upon herself to "straighten up" my office and the cable to the hard drive was nowhere to be found. Emergency trip to the Computer store where I got a new external drive (SimpleTech) but by the time I got home the laptop had died again.
The diagnostics indicated that the computer might be repaired using the Windows Diagnostic/Recovery Console which apparently I did not have, and my restore disks wanted to re-format the drive which at the time was not a good option. Next morning I took the laptop to the local Toshiba service Center for emergency surgery where I learned: The recovery console comes only with Original Windows Disks, which by the way, are no longer included with any computer bought with the operating system already installed and the only way to get it is to buy a new version of Windows (XP Media, in this case). At the Service Center, they ran the Recovery console and after a 3 hour wait (and a huge bill), I was told that they could not get the computer to boot but we could try taking the drive out, placing it in an external enclosure and accessing it as an external drive. Luckily this worked and I was able to finally connect this drive to a separate computer and back up the entire drive. I got a new HP laptop with Windows Vista and was able to copy my data back but the problem is that some applications such as pcAnywhere that ran on XP no longer run on Vista...ah well... It is interesting to note that the new HP laptops (and likely most new laptops with Vista) do not even include a recovery CD, instead, you have to create one yourself and you are allowed to do this ONLU ONCE!!! It takes 2 DVDs or 10 CDS and it takes app. One hour plus. Since I had all my files backed up, I went back to the original Toshiba laptop to use the original recovery disks and see if I could ring it back. The system tells me that the drive will be reformatted and the original OS restored; after 3 hours of slow progress, an error message pops up and asks for the A: drive...I have not had an A: drive in a while now...oh well...looks like the hard disk is toast, I will try a new hard disk as the laptop is fairly new and has an awesome screen. Lessons Learned: Back up, backup, backup...I was lucky that I was able to recover my unsaved data but I could have easily lost it all. I have also learned that unless you buy a separate license for Windows, your chances of recovering from a disk failure are not good as the license you get from the pc vendor amounts basically to have the system loaded one time on your machine. If you have not created your recovery disks, by all means do it. My new laptop had 2 built-in drives; I plan to "ghost" the OS on the second drive and automate backup of critical data for the main drive to the second drive AND to an external drive as well. Access to my e-mail through my domain provider was painfully slow and I decided to wait to read most e-mails until after I had setup my e-mail in the new computer; needless to say, I missed my daily R:Base e-mail fix most of all. The other thing that it reminded me is how good R:Base tech. support is. A call to John was all I needed to be reassured that when I am ready to reload the R:Base software, RBTI will be there to help. I am still waiting to hear from Toshiba and other vendors and needless to say, I was not able to get a hold of Bill Gates either...LOL. P.S. So far I like Vista; it seems to run well with 2 Gb of memory.
