Rant 708 / Somali Pirates Have Balls

My PC died again. How many times has it been? All I know is that it's going to be the third time I'm bringing it back to Sim Lim Square tomorrow.

This time, it's mostly my fault.

I was playing ME2, in the Project Overlord mission from the DLC. After going into the entrance to Prometheus, I got stuck on the loading screen.

So after 5 mins, I got impatient. Everything responded normally, except I couldn't go back to Windows (which was not surprising for a loading screen).

Irritation set in. I began using keys like Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Alt-Del and finally the Reset and Power buttons. No use.

Then I gave up. Went away for a while before returning to find a black screen with a responsive cursor. So I went away again.

After some time it gave me an error which I can't recall now. Didn't think it was important. My reply was to shut it down by force. Can't remember how. Probably switched off the PSU.

When I rebooted it later, it gave me a different error. After leaving the initial booting screen that listed all the drives and USB devices, it went to a black screen with only the following words:

A disk read error occurred.

Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart.

I'd never encountered such a problem before. I didn't know shutting down a computer by force could do this.

Restarting the PC led to the same screen with the same error.

After lots of trials and error, I began to boot from the Windows DVD. At the System Recovery console, I was told a certain problem was preventing basically everything that it could do from being done. Upon further random clicking, I learnt that this particular problem was a major yet simple issue:

No hard disk was detected.

Nothing screams, "You're fucked!" like this error does.

This means no more save files.

I'm so not playing ME2 anymore, not in a very long time. I've completed so many side missions and the Project Overlord was the last major side mission (minor side missions are those you find from scanning planets) I had left before ending the game.

Now I've to start from scratch completely. Wait.. let me check my ME1 saves on this laptop. Please be there...



YES I STILL HAVE THOSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm going to back them all up. Losing those would be so devastating. I've got so many completed runs there.

I think the term for this is "bricked", as in "My hard disk is bricked." I'm not sure because my BIOS still includes it in the SATA list. Most likely though, I'm going to have to bring a hundred bucks to pay for a new hard disk tomorrow.



Can't help but wonder why these things are happening so frequently. A dead hard disk is still tolerable but a problem nonetheless.



EDIT: I unplugged and replugged the 2 cables connecting to my hard disk. Now it's detected but when I tried to load Safe Mode, it got stuck at crcdisk.sys.

After a while of waiting for it to load while I browed the Western Digital website for diagnostics softwares (a new idea I got while reading more google results I got from searching new phrases that have to do with "hard disk" instead of "loading bars" and "Windows"), it restarted all by itself.

Now it's perfectly normal again.

Yes it's now in Windows. I could not help but say "Holy fuck..." when I saw this.

WHY?

This computer... it's like it's got regenerative abilities. Ok, gtg need to back up save files and scan the hard disk.



EDIT 2: Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows is going to take 1h30m to complete an Extended Test on my hard disk. Oh well, what needs to be done needs to be done.


EDIT3: According to the test result, my hard disk is in perfect condition. Not a single bad sector detected. I'm so confused.

So.

Confused.