April 26, 2014 – Recovering my disk after the triple threat

Last Sunday night, I was typing up my recent visit to Hestan Vineyard’s Yountville tasting room when my computer automatically shut down, rebooted, and rebooted again without reaching the login screen.  Then, the computer would crash frequently with the infamous Blue Screen of Death.  I could make this happen on command by attempting to use System Restore – the tell-tale sign of a virus infection.  And the two reboots were symptoms of a driver being installed.  It would seem that one of my programs had been hacked by a nasty virus.  On top of this, last year I installed some software that was expecting an older version of Windows and would pop up an error message every 15 minutes.  Try as I may, I was forced with reimaging my disk drive to fix this problem.  Finally, while investigating the virus issue, I ran the disk diagnostic and discovered an unrecoverable bad spot in the middle of the disk.  All three of these problems were solved by replacing my hard disk and reinstalling everything.  Fortunately I was able to back up my files (I had to unplug from the network to prevent crashes), so all was not lost – just delayed.

So, this is why I have been absent for the past week.  I do apologize for not having new content available.  I will continue to publish new content regularly now that I am back online.  Unfortunately, I lost the first half of my Hestan write-up when my system rebooted – the solution to my problems resulted in a newer version of Microsoft Word that did not recognize the old auto-save file.  Oh well, at least my experience there was not forgotten.  Look for it soon.

And, above all, thanks for your patience.