Son Goku
No lover of dogma
- Joined
- 14 Jun 2004
- Messages
- 1,980
Wooah, yeah a bad cable will do it...
BTW, and while you're on it (and now that it's working), time to think of a data backup. You back it up, not necessarily to another hard drive, but to some other media such as a CD-RW (OK, the data might be too much for this now...it worked for me until about 2001 or there abouts), DVD-RW, a tape backup, or the like...
And come to think of it, when I get some money, I should buy another backup device now that CDs are out. I have all my data on a second drive, but your encounter highlights the risks of not having a recent backup...
Also good to have the data (basically anything you can't replace) in seperate directories from the programs (mine is in e:\users and e:\data, from back when I still had data on my c: drive for dos and win95..., never merged the 2 data directories). Programs by default save the data to their own program directories or the like, bad idea... The programs you can always reinstall, the data you can't. You might want directories in the data directories for your service pack, drivers, and any freeware software (the installer executables) you downloaded that you'd have to spend time hunting down again to recover as well...
Oh, and lest I forget, if you downloaded a firewall program... Best to reinstall that before connecting the comp to the network. Was never an issue for me, but about 1.5 years ago during a somewhat routine format/fresh install I got hit by one of them dumb worms that auto-updates itself to one's comp, the second I got the IP address info added, and before I had even a second to download the stuff from Windows Update...
BTW, and while you're on it (and now that it's working), time to think of a data backup. You back it up, not necessarily to another hard drive, but to some other media such as a CD-RW (OK, the data might be too much for this now...it worked for me until about 2001 or there abouts), DVD-RW, a tape backup, or the like...
And come to think of it, when I get some money, I should buy another backup device now that CDs are out. I have all my data on a second drive, but your encounter highlights the risks of not having a recent backup...
Also good to have the data (basically anything you can't replace) in seperate directories from the programs (mine is in e:\users and e:\data, from back when I still had data on my c: drive for dos and win95..., never merged the 2 data directories). Programs by default save the data to their own program directories or the like, bad idea... The programs you can always reinstall, the data you can't. You might want directories in the data directories for your service pack, drivers, and any freeware software (the installer executables) you downloaded that you'd have to spend time hunting down again to recover as well...
Oh, and lest I forget, if you downloaded a firewall program... Best to reinstall that before connecting the comp to the network. Was never an issue for me, but about 1.5 years ago during a somewhat routine format/fresh install I got hit by one of them dumb worms that auto-updates itself to one's comp, the second I got the IP address info added, and before I had even a second to download the stuff from Windows Update...