Nothing like a system crash to ruin your day

[El Chuxter]

Well, week, really.

Looks like my hard drive had a couple of bad sectors. TurboTax just happened to install itself onto two of them. Which locked the computer up when I tried to print my returns. Then, when I had to turn it off because it wouldn't respond for quite some time, it apparently corrupted the registry.

I've now spent the better part of two days trying to get it to work, coming to the conclusion that it will not (neither the uselessly misnamed "Startup Repair" nor restoring to an earlier point will work, though they can both tell me that, following a thorough chkdsk, the only issue is a corrupted registry, and Safe Mode won't boot up, either... so don't think I haven't tried everything that I or anyone else I've spoken to could think of), and backing up a crap-ton of files manually.

As much as I loathe Macintosh (okay, just ambivalent, really), Bill Gates and his crazy crew have essentially convinced me to jump ship. For multiple solutions to be able to tell me what's wrong but none of them (or others) to be able to fix it is ridiculous.

Looks like I'll be installing a new hard drive (just in case) and reinstalling Windows on that one just to get it to work. :(

[JediTricks]

Sounds like you have a virus. If you can, find a boot-time anti-virus you can run from a USB drive, something good at kicking out root kits.

If it's not a virus, you could repair/reinstall from the Windows disk and have the system flag any sectors as bad (although your chkdsk should have already done exactly that and didn't, which is why I suspect virus - you had just installed software too, always a sign).

[El Chuxter]

The chkdisk did flag eight bad sectors, two of which had components of TurboTax on them. I'm just going to reinstall Windows after I get a new drive, then slave the first one and thoroughly scan it. The drive's about six years old, so I think it's just getting old.

Thankfully all the data I hadn't gotten around to backing up was intact. It's just a hassle to fix it now.

[JediTricks]

That sucks, but at least you have a clear idea of what's wrong. Did you have a power outage where the arms dropped onto the surface perhaps? 6 years ain't terribly old for a modern drive, although some brands have higher rates of failure than others.

At least you got your data out. That's paramount importance.