This is a deviation from the normal type of posts:

I’m currently carrying out maintenance of my main computer due to the hard-disk packing up. basically what’s been happening over the last 3 days is that for no apparent reason the machine’s been randomly BSODing; just a couple of times a day at first, then more including at boot. Yesterday the CHKDSK initiated after crash at boot 3 times and repaired errors on the disk, only for it to crash again at boot, sometimes activating CHKDSK before attempted reboot.

The situation now is that it won’t boot at all without crashing.

I had a second drive in the machine; so I disconnected the faulty drive from the motherboard and connected the second drive in its place. I switched on and was planning on using Windows Automated System Recovery to restore things. My backup was on the drive that I was now using – Which Windows promptly formatted! Fortunately I had a copy of the backup on an external disk.

I though that I’d left it connected to this second computer which I’m on now, so I switched it on but found that it wasn’t. OK fair enough. I didn’t realise that it was connected to the machine I was working on.

I went out to the kitchen to make coffee and returned a while later to a dialog box telling me that Windows ASR was formatting volume \DosDevices\ D: … and the external drive was spinning away with a constant green light on:

So thanks Windows – You just ruined any chance I had of making things easy: Now I’ll have to try and use a month-old backup which I have stored on this computer, or I’ll have to rely on the slow restore of Carbonite online backup.

This operation is clearly going to take the rest of the day: In future I’m using Acronis and Carbonite/Backblaze online backups only.