How I Crashed, and Lived to Tell About It

The persistent glitches on start-up should have sent warning bells ringing in my head, but that day I missed them completely. I was too preoccupied with trying to finish the project that I lost my common sense to stop, take a look around, and only move on when everything was absolutely safe. There was nothing that could distract me. Not the cold, not my aching eyes, and certainly not a few hurdles at the beginning. I was determined to smooth out my project and get it ready for presentation.

The whole thing happened so quickly and was over in less than a minute. I rebooted to finish installing an update, waited, waited ... and waited.

The blank screen stared back at me silently.

The truth began to painfully sink into my gut like a dull knife: I had suffered a crash.

Dreaded, unwelcome thoughts of losing ELEVEN GigaBytes of my porfolio - every document, every graphic, everything I had worked so hard at - began playing through my mind. I had no other copies of my files, ALL my files, since high school, except those on my PC. And now it just sat there, mocking me. I began to panic. I instinctively pressed the reset button and restarted the PC several times, with the same gloomy results. The BIOS setup indicated that my hard drives were intact, but since the operating system could not start, I had no way of knowing whether or not I was ever going to see my beloved files again.

Then a ray of light struck me and made me slap my head in "stupid-feelingness." I had just moved all my documents to another hard drive, the second one, by moving the "My Documents" pointer. My OS was on the first and that had crashed. That should have (hopefully) left my storage drive intact. With a little bit of luck, I should be able to reformat the primary hard drive, reinstall Windows, and repoint "My Documents" to my other hard drive. It should work, theoretically.

The next two hours were the longest I have ever had to endure. My fingers were crossed beyond recognition and I had probably four cups of coffee to calm my nerves (I was so nervous I forgot coffee works the opposite way, I ended up getting more and more tense).

Finally the time for first boot-up came and I had the chance to examine the storage drive. The files were there! I had never been more relieved, except for the time when I finally got home after a four-hour nonstop bus trip and I had diarrhea.

The moral lesson? Move your "My Documents" folder to another hard drive if you have one, or to another partition if you only have a single drive. In the event of a crash, you'll have a much better chance of only having to reinstall your OS and not starting from scratch with your entire portfolio.