A Lucky Escape

My big challenge on Sunday came in the form of a broken PC - after restarting Chrome to update I discovered it suddenly wouldn't load my home page (which is a page of links stored on my D drive). I then rebooted the machine as a whole, only to find that the D drive as a whole had disappeared.

Needless to say, I was less than pleased with this, given that the PC is less than six months old. I was less pleased still when I discovered that Dell's automated chat assistant was only able to point me at a couple of utterly useless troubleshooting articles. And, of course, it being Sunday there was no chance of speaking to an actual human.

Though in the event that wasn't such a big deal - the root cause turned out to be nothing Dell could really help with anyway.

In an attempt to diagnose the fault I removed the drive, plugged it into my adapter, and connected it to LC's laptop. That confirmed that the drive itself was working. I then reconnected to the other machine, and accessed the BIOS, and it was working there too. But rebooting the machine still showed the problem.

Then I got lucky. Somewhere in there the machine restarted, and suddenly it was all working again!

The reason for this is that I have a powered USB hub attached (which is on its way out) and an external hard drive (which is definitely on its way out). When the PC restarts, but not when it boots from cold, this hub often fails to activate three of the ports, including the one with the drive attached. It appears that one of those two components is causing the problem.

Which is all to the good. I'll need to get a new USB hub sooner rather than later, since the other devices that are attached are rather important. And one of these days I'll find time to actually set up our NAS, after which the external drive will be obsolete.

So, a lucky escape. Not my best ever Sunday though.