Last weekend I installed some software which required a reboot. I did, and that was the last time I saw XP running on my laptop. It simply presented me with a blue screen after reboot. Last succesful configuration: blue screen. Save mode: blue screen. Damn…

So, what now… Fortunately enough I had a second partition set up on my harddisk on which I have Vista installed. Booting in Vista still worked. Okay, let’s see what’s going on my XP partition. First, I decided to backup whatever I regard as important (among others the last code changes of Doppler ).

During the copying I noticed some strange beeping in the room. A very soft sound. Got up, walked around, trying to locate the source of it. Maybe it was a phone wanting some charge for it’s battery or something like that. But nothing to be found.

Vista was happily copying the data to my external USB drive, and suddenly there was the sound again. This time I located the source. Left below my keyboard. Where my harddisk is located. That freaked me out. A harddisk is not supposed to beep. Especially in not in different high and low beeps. And then a scratching sound was added to the beeping. Not good. Extremely not good.

Vista told me it couldn’t copy some files. mostly EXE’s. Okay, I can live with that. It tried again, and failed again. So those files where seriously corrupted. I managed to copy all the important (source code) stuff from my C: partition to my USB disk, so things are save. Let’s see if I can reinstall XP on it.

Inserted the XP Pro CD, rebooted, selected the partition on which I had XP installed and told the installation to format it. It started to format it, but it stalled at 48%. It simply halted. No error, just nothing. I had it waiting for 30 minutes until I decided to reboot again into Vista. Selected the partition, and ran a chkdsk. During the chkdsk again the beeps, high and low pitched, and the scratching sound returned. For sure a harddisk problem. I ran the chkdsk again, but now with all options selected. Vista told me it had to schedule the chkdsk at startup because of the fact that the disk was in use. I rebooted and chkdsk started. It did all kind of things and then it tried to recover files. It had to recover 158000 files… Went to bed, to find out after 8 hours that it processed 12000 of those 158000. Because I already made a backup of the important things I decided to cancel the recovering and to reboot again into Vista. Vista is still there, works, and just does it’s job.

I suspected the software I installed just before the initial reboot after which XP failed, however, my girlfriend installed the same software too and XP ran happily after the installation so I don’t think that caused the mayhem. What I did yesterday was also run a defrag. That took several hours, during which I didn’t use the computer. Then when that was done I installed the software, rebooted and then it was dead.

What now if the harddisk went bezerk before I ran the defrag, then running defrag would probably even make things even worse I assume? Well, the end result is that I now have a bunch of bytes on my C partition that make no sense at all anymore.

I’m off to the store tomorrow to buy me a new harddisk…