Three interesting computer related problems at work this week. The first two had to do with hard drives. Both PCs gave errors saying the hard drives did not exist. For the first, which is running Windows 2000 Pro, the solution was running the recovery console (boot off of the install CD and choose a recovery) and running chkdsk. Why that allowed the drive to boot I'll never know but apparently that is what did it.
The second PC did not even show that the BIOS was recognizing there was a drive plugged in. So opened the case up and fiddled with the power lead to the drive. Shaking the lead back and forth would bring the sound of a drive spooling up so I reckoned the problem was intermittent contact. I pulled that plug and put in one of the spares hanging from the power supply and all was well.
The third problem was WordPerfect related. Yes, there are offices that still use WP, especially in the legal profession. The symptom was you could not print. If you tried, two error messages would come up saying program files were missing. Strangely, if you clicked on a file, via Explorer, to print first, rather than starting WP and then opening the file, it would print just fine. A quick search of the drive found both "missing" files so that did not appear to be the problem. I checked the Corel WP site and found that one of the files needed to copied to the "Startup" folder so that it would be running before printing was commenced. And all was well.
I love it when problems get solved on the first try.
