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Disaster……averted

I’m now back in Northamptonshire on my way back to London.

Last night I had a “heart in throat moment”. After leaving Glasgow and travelling by train to Banbury, where I was picked up by Pat & Bob, I settled into my old room.

Imagine my horror when I turned on my netbook only to be greeted by a blank screen, with no amount of nudging bringing it back to life.When powering on, not even the BIOS screen was visible – this suggested to me a possible corrupted BIOS – my IT background helped me here. This could be a real problem if I could not fix it but at least it would mean that I could remove the hard drive and get at the data (if push came to shove).

I franticly tried to remember the last time I had done a backup of my work on the hard drive. I knew I had worked on my presentation document but couldn’t work out if I’d backed this up to my data stick.

Fortunately, Pat & Bob have access to the internet and I used their PC to search for knowledgebase articles that might fix my problem. After a bit of digging on the PC maker’s site I discovered a method of recovering a corrupted BIOS and, after a couple of highly tense minutes, my netbook burst back into life. Thank goodness – I will be needing this for the third course starting on Thursday.

Now to do a backup of all my valuable data and the commitment to keep it up to date in future! (you CAN teach an old dog new tricks!)

On Monday I am attending a “Communicating Sustainability” conference in London.

I will then get on a sleeper train for St Austell to see the Eden Project http://www.edenproject.com/come-and-visit/index.php – the world’s largest biodome – in Cornwall.  I then return (again by sleeper train) on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning to London before heading off on an afternoon trip to Stonehenge later that day.

So little time, so much to do. Less than two weeks now and I will be back in Australia – I’m so looking forward to getting back to my family.

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