Black screen of death

I suppose I could say I deserved it since I did what a person should never do. But I still feel sorry for myself.

Last Sunday, I came home from church, hung up my suit coat in the closet in the computer room, then glanced over at the computer. Under normal circumstances, the screen would be blank, having cycled through the screen saver to the power saver. But it wasn't blank. Far from it. It was black with white letters like the old DOS boot programs. And close to the top of the screen the words fairly yelled out, "There is no FAT on your hard drive. Data is inaccessible."

I sat down in front of the screen trying to take in what had happened. When I had left the computer it was operating fine. In fact it was in the process of ripping a tape of the Chronicles of Narnia. Had I overloaded the computer somehow?

Then it hit me. I reached down to the computer, popped out the floppy disk, and restarted the system. I was pretty sure I knew then what had happened but I still held my breath until the system came up with no glitches whatsoever.

Earlier that morning, I had found a floppy disk that appeared to be important but wasn't labeled properly. I stuck it in the computer to see what was on it. That's normally a fairly safe thing to do. But then I got distracted and forgot about doing that, forgot all about the disk. Sometime while I was away at church, Windows downloaded a system update, asked if it could restart my system, and after a 5 minute wait period when I hadn't answered, the computer restarted itself. Only problem was, this time there was a disk in the floppy drive slot and not just any old data disk/ It was a boot disk (for Windows 98). So, of course the system tried to start from that disk and found the system on the hard drive (Windows XP) highly incompatible. Crash. Or at least STOP!!

Moral of the story - never leave a floppy drive in your computer when you walk away from it. You just may get the scare of your life.

Bonus story: Since the computer had been recording the Chronicles of Narnia, I assumed the recorded file was lost when the computer restarted. I looked all over the drive for a temporary file assuming that as soon as I started the program again, it would be deleted or written over. I finally gave up, resigned to recording the whole thing again. As soon as I did, the program Polterbits said I had left the program without saving the file. Would I like to use that file or start another one? the program asked me. Turns out we have a program smart enough to keep an old file even when the program is summarily aborted. I wish Outlook were that smart. Thank you Polterbits.