Crap! Crap! Crap!

SpinRite had about 36 hours to go on my hard drive repair last night when a thunderstorm blew through and knocked out our power.

It is apparently very bad juju to cut power to a computer in the midst of SpinRite repair because it now freezes at this point about 3 seconds into power-up.

I've tried multiple re-starts, with and without the SpinRite disk in the CD drive, but I can't get past this point. I had high hopes for straightening out my hard drive problems, but it looks like the drive may be irretrievably fucked, at least as far as being a bootable drive is concerned.

I do harbor a hope that the programs and data can be rescued once I have a bootable drive in place, however.

Why, oh why didn't I act on that impulse months ago to buy an uninterruptible backup power supply? Crap.

AN HOUR LATER:

Tim Balough, who was my mentor in computers back in 1991 when I bought my first serious desktop, has saved me again.

Tim thought he was retiring when he and wife Linda moved to Alma, Colo., a few years ago, but his expertise in computers opened up a new career for him. So who better to call in a crisis?

Tim suggested I pull the power plug, hold the Start button in for  15 seconds, then reconnect the power and fire it up. Voila! My computer booted all the way to the SpinRite welcome screen.

Tim thinks the fact that SpinRite needs more than 90 hours to work on my hard drive means that the drive is near death. He recommends running SpinRite to completion, then rescuing everything important from the drive and retiring it.

I'm on my way to Office Depot to buy a backup power supply, and then I'll rerun SpinRite.

Thanks again, Tim!