Thank goodness for awesome friends · 5:54am Jan 1st, 2019
While it's had its bright spots, 2018 has ... not been a great year. I've been looking forward to putting it in my rear-view mirror. So of course it wouldn't let me go without one last battle.
About three hours ago, as I was settling in for a quiet evening of alone time (my local friends' party plans all having fallen through), I installed some routine Windows updates and rebooted my desktop computer. Only to come back to the desk to find chkdsk interrupting the boot process. It would find some faults in the file records, correct them, reboot, and then get stuck on the same errors again. In other words, most likely something going on with the hard drive.
(The good news is that no important data was at risk; all my writing is on Dropbox and my personal files are on a network storage RAID. The bad news is that I never got Windows install media with my computer, so despite my tech background, my ability to fix that myself was extremely limited — never mind if it was a drive problem rather than merely data corruption.)
Fortunately, I have one of the world's most awesome best friends; I griped to him about it via text message, and he mentioned he's got a drive dock and some spare drives sitting around from when he used to do retail computer repair, and would be happy to help me clone my drive before it fails further. I headed over to his place, computer in tow, and then as I settled in to get some work done while waiting, I discovered the second punch of 2018's final attack: My laptop was also locked up, a little plastic switch mechanically broken in the trackpad so that the mouse button was effectively held down full time, rendering it inoperable.
Three hours later, both problems are quasi-fixed, because R. is a goddamn miracle worker. The desktop is up and limping with a replacement platter hard drive (I need to go buy a replacement SSD ASAP); the trackpad is a lost cause, but after some disassembly and reassembly we at least managed to get it disabled so I can plug in a mouse; and thank goodness that he was there as a second pair of hands, because the 2018 gremlins just would not let me screw the laptop's case screws back in. Seriously: there's one screw that I worked at for two minutes because it just wouldn't catch. R came over and put it in first try. I unscrewed it, then tried screwing it back in again, and it wouldn't catch. He took the screwdriver from me and put it in again, first try.)
So, yeah. Just glad that's all over with. Here's to a much more fulfilling and productive 2019.
(... There's still about two hours left, so I really hope I'm not jinxing myself here. 
)
Happy New Year Dude!
I can sympathize.
As it happens, a bit ago, I decided it was time for me to get a new case for my main computer, the one it was in having been really old and with assorted things wrong with it. I picked up one, but made the mistake of picking up too small of a new case.
So I decided to shuffle my secondary computer into it instead, and put my primary computer in the secondary one's case. Moving the secondary computer worked fine, but I had, well, assorted trouble setting up the primary again.
One of the last gotchas was that Windows wouldn't start up my primary and one hard drive was making a lot of noise. I have four and an ssd card on that computer (essentially, every time I upgraded, I left the old drive in as well...), so it took some doing to figure out which one it was. I've got that computer up and running by unplugging that drive at this point.
It does mean I've effectively lost what was on that drive, but checking the others, I'm pretty sure that was just where a lot of my steam games were, so I've redownloaded quite a number of them. Which is probably why I'm almost at my ISP's cap for the month...
Glad you've got everything up and running, at any rate. I'd treat it as an opportunity to get a larger SSD...
--arcum42
I’m glad the story ends without tragedy!
Tech is great when it works, but it’s the worst when it doesn’t. 
wow c.c dodged that bullet
May all your new year's problems be so easily fixed.
For future reference: Many Windows-preinstalled systems that I’ve had the displeasure to work with – not all, but certainly most of those that don’t come with install media – have a secret hidden partition on the drive that contains what effectively is the install media. The actual method of invoking this install media varies with manufacturer.
Of course, with a physically broken drive that won’t do any good, so imaging the drive is the correct first step, but it would be wise to inquire with the manufacturer if your drive came with such a partition, and how to get it to boot if it did, this might save your bacon one day.
I'm glad that your friend was able to help you and things are working until a permanent fix can be had. I hope your New Year will be trouble free but if there are problems that you always have good friends at your side.
If you have an internet connection and a USB flash drive of at least 8 gigabytes, you can just download the Windows 10 install media direct from Microsoft and create your own Windows 10 installer-on-USB. It's an incredible convenience (and also pretty much the reason I don't even need an optical drive anymore - no need to bother with DVDs or blu-rays).
I’m constantly afraid of how little control we have over the inner workings of all our magic technological devices. It’s good to hear yours are at least semi-functional again, and that 2018 finally got the dust. Happy 2019!
Happy new year and onwards to a bright future!