The Corrupted Hard Drive

So one morning we have a chap (widely known for his giant lack of common sense) come through the door to our office carrying his laptop. He explains that the laptop was not booting and asked if we could take a look at it.

I asked what was happening and I got a vague explanation that the Windows XP installation was cycling at boot up. At least thats what he said.

I switched on the laptop, but instead of watching the laptop attempt to start up XP I got a "NTLDR is Missing" error and nothing else.

The guy mentioned that there were several "important files" on the c: drive (a big no-no in our company, everything should be saved to a network drive and/or USB, making hard drive failure a doddle.)

The "Broken" Hard Drive

So our favourite amateur computer technician is "on the scrounge" looking for computer parts. It was a standing joke within our department; that whenever we tried to dispose of old scrap computer parts. Old, broken parts that will probably never work again and are about to be scrapped. This guy would turn up looking for handouts. Sometimes we had to almost "fend him off with a big stick" to prevent him from taking new equipment by mistake. Even worse once our scrape had been taken away, all of the stuff he couldn't use or fix miraculously turned up again.

We show him the pile and let him help himself.

On this particular day myself and a colleague had been working on a broken PC. We had discovered the hard drive was faulty and had replaced it. When the guy walked in to ask about the parts my colleague had a idea to have a little fun.