Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Lola has died. She lost con­scious­ness yes­ter­day, was revived again briefly (by fluke, it seems) whilst I manically plonked the con­tents of my Win­dows Desktop and “My Doc­u­ments” folder onto my external 30GB HDD and then was shut down last night, and has not booted up since.

She was pur­chased at the end of Feb­ru­ary for good­ness sake, this should not be hap­pen­ing to a PC that is not even 2 4 months old. [The stress has forced my brain to mal­func­tion in sym­pathy and now I can’t even count!]

I’ve emailed Dell with my ser­vice tag and the pleth­ora of error mes­sage that greet me every time I poke the power but­ton, I’ve yet to hear anything.

I just wanted to explain what was going on here incase someone more know­ledge­able than me should hap­pen across my blog and know how to fix my ‘pooter. Unfor­tu­nately, it is pre­cisely this side of IT/computing where my know­ledge runs bone dry. I just don’t have a fuck­ing clue.

For­tu­nately, I did have the pres­ence of mind to keep a pen handy whilst I was rant­ing explet­ives at my now defunct won­derbaby and pray­ing to God to let it restart just long enough for me to get my doc­u­ments and pho­tos onto some form of remove­able stor­age (which He gran­ted, but now Lora is even more dead that she was before…).

Please note before the read­ing the fol­low­ing error mes­sages that I am run­ning on Win­dows XP Media Centre and the only bits and bobs I have attached are my 3-in-1 printer/scanner, the mon­itor, key­board, mouse and speak­ers. I have no external stor­age plugged in and only 1 hard­drive onboard… If you need any more spec details, just com­ment and let me know.…

I’ll go through what happens:

I turn com­puter on, Dell screen fol­lowed by black command-line screen…

Loading PBR for descriptor 2...done
A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

So, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del, it restarts, I get a Dell screen fol­lowed by a black command-line screen again…

Error auto-sensing secondary master harddrive
Press F1 to continue or F2 to run setup utility

I press F1 and then get:

No boot device available
Press F1 to continue or F2 to run setup utility

I press F1 and get more of the same. So I restart again and get a Dell screen fol­lowed by black command-line screen…but this time the mes­sage is slightly dif­fer­ent to before (cue bolding):

Loading PBR for descriptor 2...failed
A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

After repeatedly going ’round a couple of times (‘cuz yes­ter­day the per­sever­ance paid off, as I said, and I man­aged to save some of my stuff), I once got this message:

Previous attempts at booting system failed at checkpoint [Ithr]
Contact Dell Support blah blah with details

I want to cry. That’s my new baby…why is it dead? I didn’t do any­thing, I prom­ise! I shut it down all nicely the night before and it’s been work­ing fine up til now — it hasn’t even had a notori­ous Win­dows blue screen wobbly, or anything…it just makes no sense… The only thing I had noticed was that it had got­ten louder these last few weeks, but I just figured that it was prob­ably just due to dust build-up and the fans going 10-to-the-dozen because of the hot weather…

Any­one got any ideas?