  Funeral for a Friend Current Song: (my Launchcast station) Current Mood: Very unhappy The deed is done and all is lost; my laptop is no more. Day after day, I've struggled with that beast. Every other day -- quite literally -- it would develop bad sectors. Its performance fluctuated. The sound card was somehow becoming physically dislodged from the machine, as in the past couple of days it's been suddenly cutting out sound-wise. I've had to tap or hit the chassis of the laptop where the sound card was in order to get the sound back.
The monitor was already going bad, and would sometimes display funky lines on the screen. I would have to hit it a few times to knock it back into place. The thing was really banged up. Tonight, I was hitting it to try and get my sound back, and it just blinked off. So I turned it back on. It would get past my Windows screen, then eventually just lock up.
I rebooted, and Scandisk prompted; so I ran a scan. It tried to scan the directory structure but hung at 31%, claiming that a bad sector stopped it from being able to go further. It would try its little heart out to scan it but nothing was doing. I turned the computer off then back on. I was prompted with the menu that lets you boot in normal mode, Safe Mode, etc. I chose Command Prompt as I usually do to scandisk again.
Typed scandisk at the DOS prompt. Bad command or file name. ...Okay, change directory to c:\windows. scandisk. Bad command or file name. Um.
Dir scan*.*? There was no Scandisk.exe. Anywhere. Scandisk.exe had been wiped out. Alright, so, maybe I can catch a fluke and load Windows. Restarted the computer.
Not even my Windows 98 screen came up. It hung right after I entered my hard drive password. Crap and a half. I eventually popped in my Windows 98 disc to see if I couldn't use it as a boot disk, or just reinstall Windows. It did an automatic scandisk to check for drive integrity. Aaaand it hung again, just like last time, at 31%.
I shut down and rebooted, and then copied scandisk.exe from the CD back to my hard drive. At least that was resolved. However, since my laptop used interchangeable CD-ROM and Floppy drives, I had to shut down in order to switch drives. This posed a huge problem -- I could only get to my command prompt using the Windows 98 disc, and I needed my floppy drive to back up things. I looked around and eventually found my old Universal Boot Disk -- if I could use that to boot my computer, I could use another disk to back stuff up. The idea worked.
I managed to get into C: and grab some documents and images. I'm going to go back sometime in the near future when things have settled down and see if I can somehow get back into Windows. There's a lot more I want to back up. Ohhh, is there a lot more. However, I'm not nearly in the mood to fiddle with it all now. I'm finally starting to ease up a bit.
I've been very upset ever since it happened. I really wish I could just avoid school tomorrow and stay in bed, or maybe do something to cheer myself up. Whatever. The whole thing's a mess. I've written too much already so I won't go into my options for room-based personal computer replacement, or "What I'm Going to Do to Get Back Online From My Room. " I still have the PC out here, but mom uses it too.
I need privacy. Top it all off with the fact that I've had the menacing smell of grape soda stuck in my nose ever since Tim drank a can of it during our Chess match earlier, right now I'm not feeling my best. I have homework but I want to play Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. Maybe I'll just shrug my homework off for a while. I need something to cheer me up. 
