My computer crashed. I was using it as usual and I was interrupted by a popup informing me that my device encountered a problem and needed to restart. I had three windows open at the time. It proceeded to restart and never came back. I'm currently on a backup computer and have no access to word processor or the files produced by it..
So I'm reduced to lurking and the occasional comment or blog entry.
Comments
Random popup
The first thing I'd do if I had a random popup suddenly appear in front of me would be to ask: Is this a genuine problem?
This could so easily be malware installing itself and needing a reboot to embed itself somewhere it cannot be dislodged - like on the boot disk somewhere, or even inside the CPU firmware. Possibly, and I underline possibly, on the reboot the malware has then proceeded to wipe or encrypt your disks.
I would investigate thoroughly before doing anything like that reboot just to attempt to discover, by using other diagnostic tools, exactly what had happpened and why. If I was suspicious I would probably just pull the power plug, even though that is something that (these days) should never be done.
To prevent things happening like the above I always turn off automatic system updates: I do them at specific times and when nothing else is running on that box - and I run backups every night. That way, if there are any problems, I can (hopefully) restore and wind back to before the update. I haven't personally had any malware attacks but it has saved me a time or two when I have absent-mindedly filled up disks. Oops!
Dogs have owners; cats have staff. Grand-daughters have minions.
Genuine?
If it wasn't genuine it was an exact replica of a genuine Windows popup. That and it didn't give me much time to ponder its veracity before it restarted the computer. I did get the computer to come back to a trouble shooting screen and I started a process but my wife had an emergency and I had to leave it running while I attended that and it timed out waiting for my response.
I was just waiting for mid-June to take it in for some other problems. That's why I even have a backup to start with. My backup thumb drive was in the USB port and if I remove it I'll likely lose my backup.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin ein femininer Mann
Thumb Drive should be fine./
That's not how that works. USB Thumb Drives are persistent memory. They don't need power to save the data. if it's going to be corrupted due to the restart, it would be a write error that already happened which means it's already corrupted. But removing the thumb drive after it's already rebooted shouldn't do any issue, and in rare instances, I have seen things like thumb drives being inserted causing issues with booting, so removing all usb devices is usually my FIRST step when diagnosing a lack of boot (followed by things like checking SATA or IDE data cables, reseating ram, etc).
But none the less, -HuGs- and I hope everything turns out fine for you!
-Piper
Proper thumb drive ejection
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when I first started using thumb drives, I failed to properly eject thumb drives and lost access to what was on the drive because of it.
So I've left the drive in hoping the it will still be able to be closed out and I'll have access to my backed up files.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin ein femininer Mann
Ejecting thumb drives
You are right, up to a point. The problem is that, while the software writes data to the drive it does not always do it immediately but often waits until buffers are filled, etc. In addition, directory entries are often not updated until you eject or unmount the drive, at which point any remaining data is flushed out of the system and back to the drive. That is why Windows always nags you to go through the eject/unmount process.
That can and will leave you with a drive which may be readable but does not have the latest writes logged in the directory entries. Depending on the software involved (cough, MS Office, cough) this may leave you with a completely unreadable file.
The good news is that there is usually a local timer in the OS which does a flush maybe every second or two. This should mean that in most cases you can get away with yanking the drive and not losing anything - but getting in the habit of doing the eject rigmarole is a worthwhile thing.
Dogs have owners; cats have staff. Grand-daughters have minions.
Genuine?
"If it wasn't genuine it was an exact replica of a genuine Windows popup." Unfortunately, it's not too difficult to produce an exact replica of a genuine popup. As another commenter pointed out, data on flash drives (including thumbnail drives) stays without power. I'd go further: pull out that drive immediately, just in case. You can plug it into another computer and test it.
-- Daphne Xu
I switched over to Mac long ago at Windows version 9 or 10
I had multiple times when my Windows PC would not boot after various issues. I had multiple disc drives, and my problem was almost always that the disc drive letter designations were corrupted and switched by the issue so the operating system wasn't found when booting. C was the boot drive and I also had drives designated D, E and F. As I recall, there was no way to change back the drive designation in BIOS, or from a recovery disk. I solved the issue by unplugging all the drives except the original boot drive. That forced the computer to boot from that drive no matter what the disk drive letter was changed to. Then I could get into the operating system and re-letter the drives to the proper configuration. The non-boot drives didn't need to be plugged in during this step. Not sure exactly what your computer configuration is, or how your failure mode exhibits, but I thought I'd put this out there. When I was researching the problem on the Internet using other computers, I did not see this solution discussed much at all.
IMHO you are getting solid advice from BC folks
Only a test in another machine or at a trusted PC shop can determine if your drive is dying or not.
There are frequent warnings on my banks official site about B$%^%drs spoofing legitimate commercial/software/govt sites to do the vulnerable great harm.
The screens are near perfect versions of the real thing.
The messages can trick you into giving out vital info or worse.
Remember much of what used to be used for verification is publicly available to the determined ass&&&&s.
Just because they provide you with some of your bio data, IE soc sec number, home address, date of birth etc. does not guaranty they are legit
Plus how can they diagnose a problem/virus etc on your PC simply by you being online?
PC components DO fail but protect yourself.
In person is always the safest
NEVER click on links or call phone numbers provided FOR YOUR RAPID UNTHINKING RESPONCE by the scammers
BTW by restarting was it a WARM boot or a cold/power off then back on restart?
Powering off during a legit software update or system recovery can be bad.
But letting a fake recovery/software update run is disaster
But I rant/am off the trolly
Best of luck
John in Wauwatosa