Suffered another set-back with my PC last night – but not topping the smoking incident.
On a friend’s advice, I decided to give ZoneAlarm a try. This is a reputable software firewall, which, along with many third-party tools, beats the firewall that came with Windows XP Service Pack 2 any day in my opinion. However, that was when disaster struck.
Firstly the PC would no longer boot into Windows XP. Checking the hard disk using the Recovery Console from the installation CD also did not help. In pure desperation – since I had many photos with no back-up and some personal records on the boot hard disk – I took the boot disk to work and tried chkdsk again. Fortunately, after the first repair, I was able to read most of the data and thereby copy to a safer place. However, subsequent chkdsk’s sometimes made the same disk unreadable. read more