I'm told there are always signs, if you're willing to see them.

Yesterday morning I noticed that my computer had frozen. Copping an 'I don't have time for this' attitude, I just ignored it, had my breakfast, and went to work. When I returned home, I was greeted with a gruesome site: My computer had attempted to take it's own life.

The monitor was cold and black and bore the random scribblings of a machine mad with dispair. Near the bottom of the missive, one could just barely make out the words: "Disk Read Error."

I tried everything: Resetting the BIOS, clearing the CMOS, mouth-to-mouth recussitation, reseating the cards and cables and even difibulation. There was nothing to be done but start again.

I was lucky to have a copy of my SATA drivers on an old floppy, since at that point, there were no working floppy drives in the house. After some finagling and a few badly timed F6's, I began the long process of formatting my drive and reinstalling Windows.

What caused this terrible tragedy and could it be avoided? Actually, I don't know. I try not to write these sorts of things until I've found the solution. That way I can whine under the guise of 'helping,' instead of.. well, whining. My busiest traffic days have been after posting the solutions to virus and hardware problems (except for that time I mentioned the Paris Hilton video in passing). This time, though... I fear I may never know the truth. Everything seems to be in line, hardware and software alike. If anything comes to light, I'll be sure to share. In the meantime, look forward to a lot of gripes and groans with regard to reinstalling my OS.

PS - Oh yeah. I keep all of my documents on a seperate physical drive which is backed up by a third hard drive. No loss there. Just time.