Argh! AKICIF

[lexin]

The situation with my desktop is getting worse. Now I have blue screens of death popping up and the big question as I see it is do I cut to the chase and reinstall Windows now, or fiddle about with it some more.

Thoughts from those who know more about computers that me - is this a lost cause or is there in any mileage in continuing to play with it?

ETA: I ran the diagnostics software which came with my PC and that indicates that it's an error on the hard drive, for which the only fix is to reinstall the OS. Botheration! I was hoping to avoid that.

Comments

[doire]

How do you feel about opening the case? If you can add a second disk drive and make a copy of your current disk you can then take the failing disk out and use the new one. If it's beginning to fail you might get lucky and copy everything, if sectors have gone there will be some damaged files, but hopefully only one or two to repair.

Chris tells me that the best way to copy the disk is to make a knoppix CD and boot from that, then use DD to make the copy. That way the failing disk just needs to be read not be used. Last time I had a failing disk I took it to our local dealers (15% more expensive on average, but worth it in the long run) and they copied it onto the replacement disk I bought from them. (probably using DD but that way I didn't have to.) If you're using XP it doesn't like being moved from disk to disk so this may be less useful.

Good luck whatever you decide to do.

[lexin]

I'm all right about opening the case, but I'm running XP. However, I've taken the extreme solution and reinstalled the software, which seems to be running OK so far. I've still several programs to install, though.