Oh no…

If any of you have had to go through this, then you know… how much frustration is involved with blanking your computer because of a windows system problem.

I posted the previous blog on Saturday night and just shut down normally when I was done. I have had a couple of glitches in the past when restarting (it wouldn’t), and had to perform a system restore to push the setting back to a point where there was no problems. When I started the computer up Sunday morning, I had the same problem (it wouldn’t). So as per the past few times, I restart in safe mode, and go through the system restore routine. This time, nothing. Well ,almost nothing. the mouse cursor was on the screen, but nothing else.

Sunday morning… we are supposed to be packing up and going camping for a week and I am literally pulling my hair out trying to get my computer to restart.

I keep the following items on this computer…

Photos – about 15,000 of them, Videos – of Andrew from before he was born, Music, and to top it off, ALL my designs for work, and if that's not enough, My entire company books.

I am sick. I have NOT completed a full offsite backup in about 2 months. I completed a backup for the company about 2 weeks ago, but it is a local backup, even though Quickbooks recommends against it. No guff… I don’t want to hear it, all necessary lessons learned, thank you very much…

I call Dell. I found the number, and I called. I didn’t have to wait too long to get through and got started some diagnostic stuff happening. I had to end the call early though as the girl next door had another Seizure and was being carted into an ambulance. (they still don’t know what is wrong with her). We ended up leaving for the campground without any resolution to the issue, but I was able to let it run on some ‘deep’ diagnostics. Let’s hope it turns up something.

Monday… I come in to work and the first order of business was to call Dell again because nothing came out of the diagnostics. I will do the short version of this part of the story because it still makes me angry. I was shuffled from 1-800 number to 1-800 number about 6 times, each time with a Monday morning wait of 1/2 hour each before they realized they couldn’t help me and had to pass me on. Well, after 4 hours, they actually passed me back to the first number I called. Seriously. PLUS 1 number earlier, they told me they could help me for a fee, but didn’t have a way to take my money from Canada? SERIOUSLY?… anyway, a few curse words and I got hung up on. The solution they wanted to charge me $249.00 for?

“Re-format your hard drive. “

But there has to be a way to get the information off the computer.

‘nope. Reformat”

Ok, you suck.

I called Nerds on Site. Tuesday Bryce came and within 15 minutes had me set up with a SATA connector that pulled all the information from the supposedly dead hard drive, into a 1 terabyte portable harddrive, effectively rescuing and backing up ALL my information. Yay. Ok, I can handle this from here, no point in wasting your time. So he had all my answers, set me up with all the hardware, and taught me all the tools to fix it in the future AND to avoid the issue, all in about an hour, for the price of … you guessed… $249.00. Yep, I think i love Bryce. Once everything was transferred, I restored the computer. It was surprisingly satisfying by now… hehe.

Anyway I am back online, in more ways than one, and none the worse for wear.

I have an immense amount to blog about too.

Our trip 21km south to Okotoks (which isn’t over yet), The lancaster tail gunner from WWII that was camped next to us the first night, The 75 year old Dane that camped next to on day 2, the hillbillies on the other side of us, the RV repairman who lives in our campground, that fixed the furnace (finally), having my wallet run over, Andrew, Andrew and more Andrew, Andrew in a big boy bed in the camper, meeting real fulltimers, surprising real fulltimers with how much I know about fulltiming( thanks Howard and Linda)…. and on and on.

Should I do it all in one? or break it up?… we’ll see… won’t we…