Suddenly, you get up in the middle of night screaming and finding yourself cold sweat, but relaxed after seeing that you are in bed and it was just a dream. However, next morning you get up, dress up yourself, and go to your office. After starting your PC in your office, you again scream and cold sweat, due to another nightmare; your computer is slowing down, unbootable, or performing unnecessary tasks due to some nasty malware. All these circumstances cause inaccessibility or loss of your days or months of work. You cannot overcome this nightmare just by waking up!!! You have to fix these problems and get back your crucial data.
Mentioned below are six most common nightmares of computer data and ways to fix them:
1. Your PC Doesn’t Boot
Many of you encounter situations in which your PC becomes completely unbootable. At such situation, you should try booting your system with Windows recovery disk. However, if you do not have CD/DVD of your Windows recovery disk, then you can borrow it from someone. In case, if your PC is not even booting from the CD, then go to its setup screen and change the boot order. By doing this, the CD/DVD drive or optical drive appears before the hard drive. After this, you will get an onscreen message telling that you have to press a particular key ‘for setup’.
If your system boots, then follow the prompts. Most likely, the utility will tell you what the problem is and ask whether you want to fix it or not. You do. However, if it doesn’t ask you, or if the disk is unable to fix the problem, then you’ll find a menu with various options. You can either use Startup Repair or System Restore. Now let’s take another case, in which your PC fails to boot before entering to set up or booting from CD, then there is some hardware problem. At such situation, you have to go to the data recovery service professional.
[Read also: Diagnosing PC Problems]
2. Regular Appearance of Blue Screen of Death
If you are interrupting by Blue Screen of Death regularly, then you have problem, which needs to be rectified. Almost all latest versions of Windows maintain a log of the ‘Stop Errors’ or ‘Blue Screen of Death’. Stop errors are generally related to hardware or drivers. This program shows the list of drives that were running at the time of crash and highlights the suspected ones. If same drivers are causing multiple crashes, then you have to update them.
[Read also: Why Does My Computer Shut Off By Itself Unexpectedly? – Common Causes and Fixes]
3. Hard Drive Inaccessible
Sometimes, the hard drive of your computer becomes inaccessible and thus Windows can’t boot. However, this situation can easily be overcome, if you have an updated backup. If your drive is making noise, which you haven’t heard before, then shut down your PC immediately. Send your drive to data recovery service provider as soon as possible as it is hardware related problem. If your drives are not making any kind of sound and you still encountering inaccessibility of data, then using efficient data recovery software is recommended.
4. Missing Administrator Password
If a person leaves your organization without revealing the password applied to his/her computer, then all the data saved on his/her PC becomes inaccessible. Fortunately, you can recover the password applied to your computer through password reset disk, another account on the same system with admin rights, or last but not the least, through third-party password recovery tool.
5. Loss of an Important File
You have been creating a PowerPoint presentation for 15 days. A day before the presentation, you find it missing from its location! Hold your breath, may be you have moved it to some other folder. Go to Start menu and type the name of the file and observe the results. If nothing appears, then there’s a possibility that the file has been renamed. At such situation, again go to Start and type a word that was in the presentation. Hopefully, this will bring better result. However, if you didn’t get any result, then search in the Recycle Bin as it can possibly be deleted by you accidentally. Don’t worry, as you can restore your data from backup.
[Read also: How to Use Recovery Partition to Factory Reset Your Laptop]
6. Virus Infected Your PC
Sometimes, your PC starts behaving like an annoying kid and refuses to follow instructions or unexpectedly slows down. All these situations render that your PC is infected by virus. To remove viruses, you have to use updated antivirus software that has definitions for all the latest viruses. Having an effective antivirus program can keep you to get out of all such situations.
These are the 6 common and possible nightmares that could happen to your computer and the ways to fix them. So what are your computer nightmares? Is it hardware related such as a broken laptop screen maybe? Or is it bad software? Or hackers hacked into your system? Let us know in the comments.
[Read also: Common Computer and Tech Issues You Can Resolve Yourself]
good tips to fix common problems. I thank you for these tips. Most of the time I get a blue screen problem. I’ll try your tips now and update the drivers.
Coincident . . . .. . Today when i woke up, and started my computer and saw Blue Screen error then i was scared lol…..
But after restarting its working fine…. Now i have to keep backups…..
Nice Post Abhay.
Welcome Amit.
Blue screen is the top most scary errors which deals with heavy data loss circumstances. You should always take backup copy and distribute it to more than 3 places.
I have experienced these nightmares esp corrupt hard drive, boot issues and virus issues. I didnt know how to solve them then. Can do a better job now. Handy and informative post.
hmmmm..really nice share. these are the common problems which everyone faces. specially the blue screen of death but i am lucky.my laptop is safe
I haven’t had a problem with any of these in a while fingers crossed though. I do remember the annoying BSOD. It was much more common in the Windows 98 and early days. Windows XP I rarely saw it, and so far with Windows 7 I haven’t seen it yet.
Even I used to get BSOD many times. But after I formatted my hard disk and re-installed XP in it, the problem vanished. Maybe some of my drivers had been corrupted by some kind of virus or something.
Formatting will definitely removes the corrupted file system or virus infection but you should agree to loose whole your data, which can’t be recovered if overwritten. So, it’s better to have any data backup plan and making them physically as well as online available.
Thanks for your valuable feedback though.
Yes I know but I always keep my windows drive clean and do not use it for important data and whenever I face much problems and need a re-format, I always format only my windows drive. So my data is also saved and I get a PC which is almost like a new one!
That would be the best option to fight well against data loss situations.
P.S.: Blue & Black screen of death are the two most dangerous cases which can make your system completely inaccessible and formatting Windows wouldn’t do the trick as it occurs due to of faulty hard drive or any other hardware failure which needs replacement and professional help to get back precious data.
Computer is the main thing from where we can work with the help of computer and makes our data save if the computer makes problem than its a loss for us.Your all step to fix the computer are so helpful.I must.Luckily i did not face the blue screen death .
The last time I had to clean up my computer it was because I got a blue screen error. It wasn’t due to a driver issue, it was actually a problem with the registry. Thanks for the great article though. If I encounter any of the other 5 PC nightmares, I know where to go for advice.