Last night I went to bed both demoralised and pissed off at a computer that simply wouldn't start. The symptoms started a few nights ago, when Starcraft 2 wouldn't load. I play the game every night, and something like this is easily noticeable for me, why wouldn't it start? After trying a few times however it seemed fine.
Fast forward 20 minutes and I'm playing the game perfectly fine! A sudden freeze happens, followed by another, and another! Until leading to an eventual permanent freeze. I alt-tab to close the game, however even task manager is not-responding.
Anyway, this continues for a while. I virus checked the computer, I defragged my drives, and I couldn't find a single thing wrong. Except that I couldn't play anything. Dragon Age wouldn't start, nor would Farcry 4 or Starcraft 2. What did all of these games have in common? They were on my games HDD, D Drive.
It still hadn't occurred to me what the problem was though, and only when my computer wouldn't even get past the bios did it start to occur to me. I thought it was the SSD (C Drive) however and tried doing an HDD test through an ISO... It was fine?! How could my computer not start if another hard-drive, unrelated to Windows, was faulty?
At this point I removed the GPU (no easy feat! Have you seen the size of this thing?! and cleared the CMOS. Although like an moron this took two tries because I forgot to unplug the power the first time... You'd think I had no experience at all with things like this... Anyway! I got there in the end. Alas, it still wouldn't start.
As a last ditch effort before wiping the SSD and formatting it, I decided to boot with just the SSD. After running through a boot loop of 'updating windows' and 'can't update, restarting' for about 25 minutes, the impossible happened. It started. And then it started again. And again. The SSD was in perfect working order. I quickly did a collection of HDD tests on it and the SSD is not the problem.
The next step was to plug one other HDD back in and see if the computer would start. It didn't, and I instantly knew which drive was the culprit.
I have two main 2tb drives, one for games and one for photos/videos/my work. I was truly hoping at this point that it would be the games hard-drive, at least games are easy to reinstall. Alas, I was out of luck. Due to my photos being 85mb a piece I don't often back them up, and I haven't at all since I got this camera. I lost everything. All of my work and even a few crypto wallets. Thankfully nothing too major, but still hundreds of dollars.
I made a rookie tech mistake by trying to cut corners, and more importantly, costs, and I paid the price. I lost months of work and hundreds of dollars because I couldn't afford a backup hard-drive.
if you take one thing away from this post, please let it be this: Backup. Again. Once more! Always backup.
Sidenote: If you want to see my photos, please feel free to check them out here @devi1714. As always, thank you for reading :)