So, I turn on my PC and what do I see after the BIOS screen?
"Missing operating system"
Sh*t! What's worse, I'm a tinfoil hat wearer and everything I have is encrypted. This isn't just a case of slamming the Widows 7 disc in there and fixing everything in a few minutes. No, the system drive is encrypted and Windows wouldn't recognise anything. So I frantically searched the myriad optical disks in my room for the Truecrypt rescue disc for my desktop. I found it, but that wasn't the end of the story.
I stuck the rescue disk in there and still couldn't do anything. It kept telling me that my password was wrong so I pressed F8 and restored the key. Was that the end of the problem? Nein! It tells me the boot partition is missing. At this point I am no longer shitting bricks; I'm shitting houses. I try to get truecrypt to permanently decrypt the disk to see if that could help anything (would that make it easier to fix the problem with disc checking software or the Windows disc? Probably not, but I was willing to try everything). Then it tells me that it can't read the disc. What's worse, it told me that I had to press esc to safely abort the decryption; turning of the power would permanently f*ck up everything. But pressing esc didn't do anything! It kept beeping and telling me that it couldn't read the disk and I eventually had to press the reset button to get it out of this loop.
By this point, I had conceded that the data on my seven month old Spinpoint F3 was probably gone; I hadn't backed up for three months. By this point, I was no longer sh*tting bricks or sh*tting houses. I was shitting the motherf*ucking Palace of Versailles!
I trawled the internet for people with similar errors and found several conversations about disc checking software but nothing concrete. I'm downloading bootable disc checkers (because I couldn't boot Windows, see?) and meanwhile I'm putting an old Linux live CD in my drive and downloading a Linux version of TC because I'd heard that the rescue CDs often saw problems that weren't there. Would this be more successful? I didn't have a fucking clue what I was doing because I was tired and desperate.
So, I take the USB stick with the Linux version of TC I'd downloaded and was about to stick it in the slot when I noticed something
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There was another USB stick in there that I'd completely forgotten about. A while ago, I had set the boot priority for USB sticks higher than the priority for the internal HDD. I remember not being able to boot at other times when I still had a USB stick in there, but every other time I'd remembered that I'd left a stick in, so there wasn't a problem. Could this be the reason why it didn't boot? Had I not put the boot priority back?
I took the stick out, pressed the reset button and prayed to Richard Dawkins that it would work. I entered my TC password and, for a second, the screen went black instead of telling me there was no bootable partition. Then I saw Windows starting up.
I haven't been so relieved and embarrassed for a long time!
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It makes me wonder whether traditional SSDs are going to become obsolete just as they become affordable.
