Officially Losing Everything, One Click Sound At A Time

If you think that my unable to back up some files (due to TeraCopy) when my Windows 7 had a coming together is bad enough, you are very wrong. It's been almost a year that this happened, and I've been downloading stuffs and making game contents, to the point that I have a tendency of changing my mind of working my WIPs. Unfortunately, it was this day where the laptop I have been using up to now (prior to this post) did have a coming together, this time it's a serious one; its HDD unleashed its "click of death" sound, rendering the 1 TB HDD dead and signified the loss of all of the downloaded things.

Losing lots of GB consisting your downloads, movies, songs, WIPs, and documents while you didn't have lots of money to back all those up? Right in the Feels! (Image: LolSnaps)

SECONDS OF THE HDD'S DEATH

So approximately four days before this post, I was just doing my browsing activities as usual, right until I wanted to play a video file so badly. The browsing activity I did took place after I trained for GeneRally Touring Car Challenge where the next and the final race will take place on Sartalas's Enna Pergusa. Combined with how "tail-happy" the car's physics are, drivers are tested to take a series of bus stop chicanes in a single shot without either flying due to sunk tires or hitting the hay bale. To obtain the best result possible, one must be able to take those corners without braking except necessary, and doing that without hitting any instance of a hay bale or two is nerve-wrecking, to the point that I tend to lose my temper everytime I hit those barriers. Unfortunately, this kind of emotional breakdown isn't the first instance; GRID Hattrick races were the first time I do it. The desire to gain a Top 50% finish has made me a monster that I am now, even though I still can control my emotions when posting. And if a Greeed were to insert a coin to my forehead, I would produce lots of Cell Medals and birth a Yummy already.

Back to the video thing, even though the video player software was opened, it was still loading. The loading time was so unbearable that I decided to restart my laptop since restarting could solve minor problems. However, even if I pressed the "Shut Down" option, it doesn't shut down immediately, so the only method that works in such a desperate time was to Cold Shutdown, a.k.a the craziest, risky solution ever taken in a pinch where you shut down your computer / laptop simply by holding the power button until it's turned off. After the cold shutdown, I restarted the laptop back but then, when booting up, there came "Automatic Repair", and when I waited it long enough, there was a click sound, which turned out to be my laptop's HDD. Granted that my class was canceled due to the lecturer stuck in the traffic amidst the heavy rain on that day, I decided to bring my laptop to the same technician's place where I reinstalled Windows 7 and Windows 8, and yes, the HDD is now dead, and there's no way to back its files up. While it did made me cry (don't let the word fool you, it was my heart that's crying), I remembered that there's a HDD recovery service. Unfortunately, this is THE only last resort to call the 1 TB HDD quits while backing up everything with a price worth of IDR 2800 K (which is roughly $230), exclude another set of additional costs. And not to mention that I HAVE TO buy an external HDD of the same capacity as the broken HDD has, which equals more money, to which I haven't had that much money at the moment. This way, my HDD can rest happily while all of its files would reside on the new, external HDD.

Online cloud drives should have been my go-to before this situation happens, but it only is feasible for documents. Having lots of WIPs, I cannot care because those files should be stored in a more private cloud drive, and not to mention each cloud drive I have has 15 GB of capacity. Even though that I could theoretically  store 45 GB files in three different places (I have three cloud drives with different purposes), I didn't take this option very seriously.

STARTING ANEW

Windows 8.1 - Dai-Shogun's Operating System

Granted that I still have the old HDD my laptop originally had, I decided to use it as a the "temporary" solution in waiting my money to come faster so I could back up all the bombshell on my broken HDD. Unfortunately, the technician can no longer install Windows 8 for some reason, and I couldn't take Windows 7 anymore, so the only OS that can be installed is the Windows 8.1, which most people hate for its lower performance for gaming. Granted, the files that previously reside in the HDD when it was running its external HDD duty were backed up into a new data-only drive, but at the cost of the very low OS partition size. There are lots of pluses though; Photoshop CS6 and Microsoft Office 2013 are some of them, not to mention that Windows 8.1 has a lot of productivity vibe Windows 8 somehow unable to achieve.

Off-topic, my Windows 8 actually had an Orphan Black theme where it has an Orphan Black wallpaper, black window colors, Cosima's laptop skin as the lock screen, and the username given is... Elizabeth Childs. This time, my 8.1 is full of Kamen Rider Gaim theme, specifically Kiwami Arms. However this time I synced my 8.1 with my Microsoft account and not Kouta Kazuraba as the username. In addition, it has white windows colors to show its silver colors, yet the lock screen remains unchanged (it will be changed later on).

The best thing is that after days of using the OS, there aren't lags of any kind save for one Firefox case. Playing movies proved to be smooth tested by 2 Kamen Rider Gaim movies I fortunately backed up and watched: the Summer movie with the Sengoku Era theme gathering Kamen Rider Wizard and other Heisei Riders and the Heisei vs Showa special that also features Super Sentai, most notably Kyoryuger and ToQGer. The latter did lag for a short time, but the lag isn't a big deal, so to say. The same for playing music, only this time there are no lags unlike the video playing and of course the old HDD had.

Overall, I'm content with this OS. It's true it might be slower in gaming, but in my case, especially when I played GTR 2 I backed up before the crash happened, there's no significant difference. Hell, my game selections aren't that hardcore (e.g., rFactor, GTR 2, TMUF, certain top-down games) so it's not a biggie. Other than that, it's a killer in the productivity department, and is more a killer with decent RAM size.

NEVER DO MY MISTAKE

Even with the fact that I'm now living with the 8.1, there's one mistake I have actually made yet I cluelessly continued to live: NEVER USE TWO WINDOWS OSes (Dual Booting), among other reasons. It never is a good idea, and not to mention that it is unstable, according to my technician. I experienced various effects, ranging from blue screens when using a certain application, slowness and most importantly the "Scanning and Repairing Drive [third partition here] -> Cannot Access [your third partition] - The Parameter is Incorrect" thing that lingered me many times that I resorted to chkdsk and realized the HDD actually had a series of Bad Sectors. Living with such a mistake, I also claimed that the laptop that I'm using is one of the worst, while, compared to my current 8.1 days, it's actually normal (and not to mention I forgot there are some laptops whose products are way worse than this). So after all, the reason why it was slow was not the laptop itself, but the dual boot. However, I can't fully finalize this until I buy another 1 TB HDD again, this time with only one OS installed.

Whatever it is, your laptop must use only one OS (to play safe), backup your documents when necessary, either on Cloud or an external HDD, and never resort your emotions to your laptop.

TL;DR - Never do my mistake; I am a victim of one.

~[R]