Over the weekend, I discovered that my computer would no longer bootup. It would get most of the way through the bootup process, and right before displaying the desktop, it’d crash and restart. I couldn’t get in with safe mode, and couldn’t access my hard drive with an adapter, either. Everything on the drive was inaccessible. Even worse, I had forgotten to do backups lately, meaning I was potentially losing two weeks of work.
I’ve had the worst luck with hard drives getting corrupted lately. It took me about a day, but I was eventually able to get the Windows repair to work. When I finally got in, I found out that a bunch of files were corrupted. Some files could be repaired, and some were permanently lost. Fortunately, I had backups of all the corrupted ones.