First off, yes, it’s Friday the 13th. I’m not very superstitious on this date, but I’ve also never had anything horrible happen on this date either. Until today. Note, I didn’t even know today was the 13th until after the following happened:

Last night I backed up Windows. (Lucky me, or subconsciously I knew something would happen.) This morning, I open up my desk, turn on my monitor to find a blue screen, something I don’t see often. I scan it, seeing something about scsiport. I didn’t pay too much attention to it, since I know blue screens happen, but I did figure that scsiport has to do with hard drives. So I restarted the computer to find “NTLDR is missing”!

That’s no big deal I thought, I backed up Windows last night. I load Norton Ghost, clicked on Recover My Computer and I see two hard drives. Two hard drives? Where’s the third? I check the sizes, 160GB and 80GB, but no 250GB. I start panicking even though I have a backup, because that hard drive is only a year or less old! And, I had bought it because my 80GB always had problems when Windows was on it. I don’t even use it for backups, only temporary backups. Looking at the list of backups I have, this is where I notice that it’s Friday the 13th.

My next step was to check the BIOS and find my hard drive. No 250GB hard drive there. Only two hard drives available. So, I e-mail David telling him what happened and he says a cable may have come loose. So, the next thing to do is to check the cable. If that doesn’t work, replace the cable. If that doesn’t work, cry because my hard drive is gone!

I checked the cables of all my hard drives to make sure they aren’t loose. Started up the computer and the hard drive was there again. I was happy! I just didn’t understand how the cable could become loose, but then again, I’ve had a cable on my motherboard come loose before. I may have bumped my case and nothing happened until later I guess.

Anyway, let that be a lesson to everyone who doesn’t make backups. If this happened to you and your drive actually died, what would you do without a backup and all your files are gone? Online backup solutions are available.