Well, my desktop PC was working a week ago, though the connection to the Net was dead. (Someone apparently cut the LAN cable during the renovations in the building where my office is located.)
But last week I went in to print some files, and discovered that, all of a sudden, the damned thing was refusing to boot up. Some kind of hal.dll file in the System32 folder is ganked, and I haven’t been able to make it work again. The recovery CD and boot CD aren’t working. I’m getting close to the point where I’ll have to sigh and just format the hard drive, which ain’t something I want to do, but… well, when you have no choice…
Argh. Always back up your data. It’s not that I haven’t learned the lesson, it’s just that, you know, you get busy, and don’t keep up, and then bam, one day: catastrophic failure hits. But I won’t format the drive till I know it’s non-recoverable. I’ll diddle for a while first, at least. You never know what I might pull off.
Especially with tips like these…