So, Here's What Happened This Time...
Not this time.
When I rebooted, that's when I began to get the neverending Black Screen of Death. Not even a fucking C prompt in DOS.
Then an hour or so later, I started getting these stupid error messages, blaming me for unplugging an external storage device while it was still in use. Either that or my hard drive was fucked.
Then I was given two options: To either start a repaid process or start the computer normally. But both give me the runaround by pretending to load files, then giving me the same stupid error message.
So I called an expert and he told me to remove the battery, wait 5 minutes then try to reboot the laptop with just the electric power.
Same thing. I have a glorified paperweight on my kitchen table.
Any other time, this would be a disaster since, like everyone else in the 21st century, I do everything on my laptop.
These days, it's a catastrophe. Why?
Because I finally got a literary agent interested in reading one of my novels, namely the one I'm working on, Gods of Our Fathers. Since I didn't back up the novel (I know, I know, the expert I called already excoriated me for it), I can't send it to him since the only up-to-date version I have is on my laptop (See paperweight, Glorified). So, essentially, I'm fucked. Right now I'm using an old hand-me-down laptop I gave to Mrs. JP when I got my Acer last February.
If anyone has any theories how this could've happened (DOS is unhelpfully telling me it's an I/O error, although I don't see how Input Output could play any role in this), I'd appreciate hearing some theories. My email, if you don't already know, is Crawman2@yahoo.com. I desperately need help and this book could mean the difference between us keeping a roof over our heads in the near future or living out of our car (See Catastrophe).
posted by jurassicpork @ Tuesday, November 24, 2015
6 comments
6 Comments:
You know what you could have done instead of writing a complainy blog post about how much your life sucks and declare that all is lost? Used that 400 words as a start for a 10 page version of your novel - maybe 10,000 words, or even a sample chapter. You have an agent interested in your work. You can write your way out of this problem. Why are you not typing away like a fucking banshie? You’re a writer! A word machine. Surely this task is not beyond you.
You’ve also published several books. Will your literary agent not look at those as an example of your writing and have more confidence that you can deliver on this new book? I think there is a high probability that she would - if they’re any good that is.
Yet you feel that you have to get on the internet and whine about how you can’t get a break. If you have any writing skill at all, there are many avenues you can pursue to generate an income. This blog could be way more monetized than it is. I see you have a donate button, which is a good start. The way you ask for donations is pathetic, but it’s something. What I don’t see are reviews that have affiliate links, short story ebooks. I don’t see thoughtful articles about interesting subjects. I don’t see anything that makes people want to come to this blog to enjoy your writing.
Instead you complain, you blame others, you beg for charity when you could earn. You could be creative about your income problem, but you choose excuses and predestine your failure. You’ve had a few setbacks, that’s understandable; the writing market is filled with men like you and I who love words and want to make a living at what we love. Your writing career is literally in your hands. The only thing holding you back is yourself. Take control. Complaining never did a writer any good - it only serves to make them miserable. And you are miserable, you don’t have to be.
As for your computer problems - lesson learned. Don’t do that again. The future holds much brighter things. Because the future belongs to those who those who believe in making it wonderful.
OK, Danny Boy? I don't know who the hell you think you are but I can tell you: You're the brother of a stalker and a budding troll in your own right. You surf into my site from God knows where and for God knows why since you're immediately prepared to disrespect the web owner.
#1, I did not ask this to happen to me. No one can tell me why this happened except to say it is an Act of God. I have already owned I was stupid for not backing up a novel for the first time in countless years.
#2 Again, your Mike Nelson-wannabe brother "Sugar Ray Dodge" is a seriously disturbed man who thinks nothing of stalking me, writing fake one star reviews of my books and plastering them on Amazon and Goodreads. I notice you made no reference to him. I cannot say I blame you.
#3 You know nothing about me other than what little I write about myself on here. You make assumptions based on complete ignorance and have excoriated me for writing a short blog post that took me all of 10 minutes if that to write when I should have been writing fiction. How do you know what I have or haven't written in between talking to the idiots at Best Buy, then three idiots at Acer when I found I could not get online since my new hard drive or OS didn't come with the device driver? You know what I am doing right now? Desperately trying to rock an old ten year-old computer for which I need an ethernet cable just to connect to the internet responding to another Chadwick troll.
I don't need you lecturing me on the quality or interest of my posts because your opinion is just one of many. You seem to have made it a habit to regularly troll my blog like your online stalker brother Dave (maybe it's a family tradition). But the last thing I need is another Chadwick troll surfing in to make my life more miserable than it already is.
#4 Stop acting as if I don't have the right to ask for assistance once in a while or that I'm the first blogger to ever do this. Economically, it's a horrible, cold world out there and the closer rent day comes, the colder it seems to get. I have a girlfriend and a cat to worry about keeping housed and fed and warm. YOU try doing that without an income month after month, year after year, because you're in your 50's and no one wants to fucking hire you because of your age. You have no conception what the hell you're talking about because you just surf in and do a drive-by comment from the "Farr West" and think you've given me my dressing down for the day.
Again, you know nothing about me or how frightening it is to be us. Since my hard drive crashed for mysterious reasons yesterday, Best Buy tried to screw me out of $150 to back up a hard drive they thought was intact even though it would've erased all my files. Then , after buying a $50 HD, they wanted me to give them $40 more just to install it. Then Acer wanted me to give them $100 just to talk to a tech person about the device driver issue with no guarantee of success. Every one, it seems, it out to fuck me over at a time when I don't have any money to waste but...
Danny Chadwick comes to the fucking rescue with his Dutch Uncle wisdom to tell me where I've gone wrong in my life. If you don't like the content here, then fuck off, Danny Boy. Or maybe you can't help yourself because maybe online stalking is a Chadwick thing, maybe it's in your genes. But we're done. I will waste no more time on you because I've many more worthwhile pursuits. You can keep commenting but they will get deleted, unread.
Hard Drive controller or hard drive is likely toast, if the former you can have a data recovery service retrieve the info and back up to a usb stick... latter same deal but some info may be gone forever and it will cost more as they actually have to work on the hard drive instead of just plugging it in to a "bench" computer.
From the "It may not work, but it's worth a try" department, before you send that disk out to any recovery service, try putting it into an external drive enclosure and hanging that off the borrowed laptop. You might be able to get access tot he files and can copy the novel off to another medium (like a USB drive...). An external drive enclosure that can hold the existing drive should run about $15-$20 and might be able to get you access to your old files.
After doing that, it might be worth trying to do a repair installation of the OS. An IO error could mean anything from a flaky controller to a corrupted driver file for the disk subsystem.
Mithras61 is right. You can get an external usb docking station for $20 -$30. My son has crashed / destroyed more than one computer and The Sabrent USB docking station has made me a hero. I have recovered the data on more than one occasion for him. There are also free programs that you can run on your working machine that will recover corrupted files via the docking station. It could save your manuscript.
Good luck
Mike in Moo Hampshire.
Thank you, Mike & Mithras. I finally got MS to accept my product key for the OS. Now I have to somehow get the device driver so I can get online (I'm doing this on my android.)
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