Open the pod bay doors goddammit

[scarfman]

So we're at the bar exam, we get back from lunch, and back in the law library I bring my laptop out of hibernation. It tells me that both of the USB devices, flash drive and wireless mouse, which I'm accustomed to using with it are malfunctioning (that is, eventually I realize it's talking about the flash drive as well as about the mouse that isn't moving the cursor) and cannot be identified. It strikes me unlikely that both would crap out at once, so I decide to restart and see whether that fixes the problem. When I do, the laptop keeps freezing up instead of rebooting, after the Toshiba screen but before the Windows screen.

So now I'm on the law library's public use internet PC. And it also tells me that the flash drive has malfunctioned and cannot be identified. That is to say, the device which holds my daily backups for the data on the computer that won't start. (Good thing that, within the week, I passed another even hundred AKOTASs and backed up to the desktop PC at home. But I still may have lost everything I drew this morning; and all updates I made since the weekend to my spreadsheet, which yesterday got a major overhaul.)

Thoughts?

Edit More here.

Comments

[trinalin.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't panic until you've tried the flash drive on a non-public computer (does your wife use a different machine than you? Check it with hers, if so.)

Wonder if maybe your USB controller/USB driver went kablooey on your laptop. There is the possibility that it then goobered up your flash drive, but maybe it didn't really.

If the flash drive is now goobered, there may be recovery software that will let you get material off of it. Some good recovery software lets you try before you buy. That is, it lets you see if it'll actually be able to recover anything and if so, then you pay for it in order to recover. (Dad did that with software for getting data off of an SD card. That was a few years back, so no idea if that company is still around.)

Anyhoo, good luck! Hope the issues are minor and fixable!

[scarfman]

Thanks for your thoughts.

I only need the data off the USB drive if the computer's dead, though even if the computer can be fixed it'd be real nice not to have to wait for that till I get the data back. I'll check the USB drive when we get home; there are several options for machines to plug it into.

How I'm going to keep up with LJ without my own laptop, though, doesn't bear thinking about.

[blinovitch.livejournal.com]

I can only wish you luck in recovering your date. trinalin speaks wisely.

[janusfiles.livejournal.com]

Well, since you've done some recent backups, I would say that at worst, you are only partially screwed.