After 11 years in computer support, I’m pretty familiar with the “Blue Screen Of Death”, or BSOD. It can mean anything from “restart your computer and everything will be fine” to “Kiss your hard drive goodbye”. So I wasn’t too thrilled yesterday afternoon to see it on my beloved IBM X40 laptop. It had been a week since my last backup, and I had a half-completed project on it.
Windows wouldn’t boot, and it blue-screened at ‘mup.sys’ which can indicate trouble with a device driver. I figured it was related to the USB external CD burner I’d connected earlier and that turned out to be the case.
It took a couple hours of command-line negotiation from an XP boot CD, but finally I saw the login screen again and all is well now. Diagnostics all pass. And you better believe I ran my SyncBack script on the “My Documents” folder!
Glad for your sake it wasn’t worse. I’ve invested in a nifty little adapter that allows me to plug a laptop hard drive into a standard IDE cable. between that, and Norton Ghost, I can recover from all but the total hard drive crash, and even then can get back to the last saved backup. The desktop computer doesn’t need to be much more than a P.O.S. with a large drive. I also blow the last Ghost image onto a spare laptop drive, so I can get back up in minutes. Otherwise, I Jones.
Ghost is amazing for backing up hard drives, I just wish there was a cheaper solution. Hmmm maybe that would be an idea for open source people. Glad to hear your laptop is back in order DOF.
I had problems with mine as well, and I complained so long and hard to Compaq I got an American. I didn’t think that was possible, but with persistance…
For those looking for a open source product try G4U. Ghost written using Linux. It’s nice.