On Tuesday morning I went to turn on my desktop computer to begin the work day when I noticed Windows was not starting. Instead, I saw the BIOS screen saying it was trying to repair the boot drive. I immediately knew this was not good. Whatever it tried to fix the drive finished and it began the start up sequence again. Nothing happened. It took me a minute to figure out that it appeared that Windows had basically vanished as far as my computer knew. Did the boot drive fail? I could still see it in the list of drives, so that wasn’t it.
I had about 15 minutes before my first meeting and I knew this wasn’t the type of thing you fixed in 15 minutes. So, I was resigned to using my laptop for the day. I didn’t even bother trying to fix my desktop for the rest of the day.
As some of you might remember, my desktop also had some sorta of failure at the beginning of the pandemic. It also prevented me from getting into Windows. This was on a different drive however, plugged into a different slot, with a different interface.
Luckily, Wednesday was a holiday, which gave me some time to figure out that re-installing Windows was my only option. While re-installing was relatively painless, I have to now re-install all my programs and games that I previously had. What a huge hassle and a waste of time.
There’s something weird going on because these type of errors shouldn’t be happening less than a year apart. If I had to guess, there some sorta of power fluctuation going that’s causing these errors. It could be either the power supply, the motherboard which distributes the power to certain components (like my current boot drive), or perhaps the powerbar that my computer is plugged into.
I’ve learned my lesson as once everything is set up again, I will make a Windows 10 backup. I might also just get a new power supply. It can’t hurt, even though replacing a power supply is a tedious task.
I’m just glad I have my laptop as a backup computing device. I can’t believe that I once thought it was a non-essential purchase. This laptop has saved me from many potential headaches.