I've often heard about the "blue screen of death" and I got to see it. All of my pics from the past five years other than the photobucket ones and about 3000 hrs of music gone. Bummmmer. Would not even get to safe mode or repair mode and just nothing. I was having trouble getting back online after the reformatting and the phone company told me to take it to "The Geek people." to reload all the drivers. My brother and I found my old discs from when I bought my system and reloaded all of the drivers and most of the programs and he loaded some more. Got the current virus and add and all that B.S. ware along with service pack 2 and an additional amount of RAM donated by my bro and 4 hours of time and I am back up and running better than ever but minus the memories. Here a few from photobucket that I really liked. David Save them some where else (back them up)

http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p8/hotrailz/HOTRODDIORAMA.jpg

http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p8/hotrailz/DALE3LEFTSIDE.jpg

http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p8/hotrailz/ANGELSONAWING.jpg

http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p8/hotrailz/VWleftside.jpg

http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p8/hotrailz/th_policecarvideo.jpg

Total bummer!!!!! Sorry for your loss!!! My puter is severely limited in the memory dept, so every few months I burn all my pics to CD. Then I clear out the whole shebang and start over. It's a pain in the arse remembering where that one special pic is, but at least I know it's somewhere obtainable..

With computers it's never a matter of IF it's going to happen, only a matter of WHEN. There's not much value for you in talking about what you should have done, but for the sake of others out there I'd like to bring a couple of rules-of-thumb to the discussion.

This scenario highlights one very important fact of computing life, which is that the most valuable thing about your computer is your DATA. Everything else is secondary, especially the operating system and applications. I work very closely with a number of different hardware platforms, operating systems, execution frameworks, and applications as part of my daily grind. It doesn't matter whether you're a Mac or a PC or a 'Buntu or a 'Droid, at the end of the day, your data is what's most important so you need to protect it using whatever means you have at your disposal on the platform, OS, and enviroment you are living in. At the same time, be wary of what and where you are storing your backups on. CD-Rs, CD-RWs, floppies, and tapes all degrade over time. Flash (solid state) drives wear out. Hard disks crash. Even online storage services have been known to lose data. One of the best defenses against data loss is redundancy, having the same data stored in more than one location to prevent a single failure from ruining your day/week/year. An external hard disk can still fail, but the probability of it failing at the same time as your internal hard disk is low... which brings me to the "what you should have done" part of the story.

In this case you had all your data on your computer's main hard disk, the same physical disk that has the operating system on it. Yeah, this is a risky way to fly if you only have ONE copy of all your data. While hard disks are statistically quite reliable, they can and do fail, especially ones I seem to own. Operating system crashes that lead to things like the infamous blue screen of death (BSOD) on Windows or the kernel panic on Mac are much more likely to happen. In your case, the BSOD, means the OS cannot load because some vital piece of data that the OS needs to find on the disk is missing or garbled. However, in all likelihood, your data, music files, pictures, videos, documents, emails, etc., were probably still intact, at least for the time being on the hard disk. Recognizing this, you needed to make an informed decision about how to proceed before you wiped your disk and started over again. Unfortunately, it's too late for you now.

What you should have done is figure out whether your DATA on your now brain dead OS strapped hard disk was more valuable to you than the cost of a replacement hard drive. Hard drives are dirt cheap these days, a 30 GB drive is around $35 and a 1.5 TB (1500 GB) drive will run you all of $125. The next course of action if you valued your data more than a small hit to your wallet would be to remove the existing BSOD-ed hard disk and do a clean install of the OS on the new hard disk. Once this was done, temporarily mount the old hard drive as a slave drive in the PC and attempt to recover all of your data from the old hard disk. It wouldn't matter whether Windows would boot on the old hard drive at this point, you just want to access the data on the old disk and copy your data over to the new disk. What makes this a viable recovery method in this case is the low cost of replacement hard drives.

When something like this happens, try not to panic. Consider your options and weigh the value of the data on your existing hard disk before you wipe it out and start over again. Unless you've had a catastrophic failure of the hard disk, and BSOD is almost never such a case, treat the old hard disk very carefully and try to recover whatever you can from it. Once you get your data off the old disk, and if it has large enough capacity, you can wipe it and use it as a backup for your data going forward. There are a number of low cost and free programs that will automatically back up your data to second hard disk. Added insurance for the "next time."

Sorry for your loss, but hopefully this will serve as a lesson to others an identify some of the recovery options that are available to other folks faced with a similar situation.

All PC's die, it's only a matter of time. I was lucky with mine, It actually starting acting up before it died completely... so I was able to transfer everything over to a new hard drive. I'm a big believer in backing things up to DVD and CD.... disks are cheap.

Sorry to hear about your woes... it really blows. External hard drives are cheap now, you might consider getting one and backing your hard drive up to it every few months.... or you can drop a ton of dough and get a Mac. I've had a MAC G3 for 10 yrs, it's never failed once on me. I use it now mostly for music stuff, and I use my PC for Internet. It seems every few months I have to troubleshoot my PC. I never understood the difference between Mac and PC, until I saw them both everyday. Macs really are WAY better machines, but the lack of software and the initial expense makes them a hard buy for most people.

One route that I went was installing a second hard drive and using Norton Ghost to copy everything. Have it set on a schedule to perform the backup task. Something else I've done is install a couple of those hard drive health monitor utilities just to hopefully receive some advance warning and not wait for it to make awful noises.

Being in the data storage industry makes me paranoid enough to have multiple copies in multiple places. It's indeed a great idea to be backing up to a second internal hard drive, but I have seen power spikes where a power supply has killed the entire computer (motherboard, CPU, hard drives, DVD ROM) as opposed to just eating itself. I also copy to an external USB drive on a weekly basis and keep it powered off and unplugged int he meantime and back up to a DVD once a month as well.

Is it overkill? Maybe... until you realize that 10 years of your kids pictures are gone and the 300 cd's you converted are now toast as well. I don't mirror everything as I don't care about most of it. I back up my pictures, music, email, and my documents folder. The rest can fall by the wayside as it can all be re-installed if need be.

Whether you own a PC or the much coveted Mac, your hardware WILL fail and you will be SOL when it happens if you aren't backing it up. Bummer about the loss, I hope it doesn't bite anyone else and your story will spare somebody the trouble in the future.

I have a copy of every picture we have taken on every machine in the house. Plus I have them copied to our print server in the Gym area. My Wife also backs them to Cd.. now heaven forbid we ever have to copy them all back onto to one drive lol...but only takes 30 minutes every sunday morning to maintain machines thats how the macs do it. they do it for you, windows just haven't figured out how to force the users to be smart. Seriously guys 30 minutes a week can save you years of grief...only thing I do not back up enough is email.. but I am sure the Goverment does that for me lol...


Dave

I have an external 1.0 TB FireWire 800 drive connected up to my Mac using the built-in Time Machine utility. It's freakishly easy to setup and use (no setup required, one click turns it on). It backs up everything that's changed on the machine once per hour. The user interface is amazingly intuitive and simple.

On my PCs I use Acronis True Image and an external USB drive. It does essentially the same thing as Time Machine, although what takes one click on the Mac takes a whole slew of setup and configuration steps on the PC and the recovery utility is geeky and cryptic compared to TM, but it does function quite well.

Be wary of CD-R and CD-RW based backups. Make sure you actually verify that the backup media can reliably restore the backed up images. This is an area of personal computing that has not evolved as well as it should have after all these years.

I have been using Macs for over ten years or so. At least since I threw my wonderfully user unfriendly IBM PS2 out the window. (Yes I did relish the sound of it smashing to bits on the concrete driveway!) I bought an Imac and have never looked back. I am currently using a Mac Mini 1.5Ghz Intel solo. The system I am using now only cost me $600 for the mini. Not too terribly expensive! I have two external hard drives, a 160GB and a 250GB, and back up the OS at least once a week on the 160. I use the 250GB for storage mostly. I am also planning on buying at least one 1TB external drive, maybe two. I learned a long time ago that the only way to back things up is to do it often and do it on an external that you can just plug and play into the next puter. Good topic! Lot's of good information.