Tag: Admin News

Update: Hard Drive May Be Dying
Posted on
Feb 7, 2024

Update: Hard Drive May Be Dying

Turned out it isn’t the hard drive which is dying – it’s the internal second drive bay! I switched another hard drive into the bay, and that started to have the same problems immediately and that’s how I knew plus a few times Disk Management couldn’t even see the hard drive, and sometimes when it did, it couldn’t initialize it.

Luckily I have have two hard drive bays in my laptop and the Windows OS + programs hard drive bay and hard drive itself are working normally, it’s just the other one with the additional (my main) hard drive bay that is malfunctioning. Now that I’ve removed the hard drive from that bay my laptop seems to be back to its normal self. But my laptop is 10 years old this year, and we had been planning with my Mom for her to buy me a new laptop as my 50th birthday present towards the end of the year anyway, so it’s really good that was already in the plans! And it’s really good there’s no terrible hurry *knock on wood* but it’ll behoove us to grab a new laptop sooner rather than later if there’s a nice sale suddenly or something!

I hooked up that removed main internal hard drive with all my stuff to my USB station, and run checks on it and it’s perfect, no problems or errors at all!

Now that my laptop only has the SSD hard drive which doesn’t have nearly enough space for all my stuff, I’m going to have to keep my main hard drive hooked up via USB hub until the new laptop. Which requires an external power source and a table or a stool to place it on close to my laptop and couch, and cords running around, it’s going to be more inconvenient to get to my files but I’m just glad I didn’t lose anything ✨✨

Posted on
Apr 26, 2022

Twitter Deleted +Current Contact Info

I never got into Twitter, hadn’t looked at my personal/fanart account for a couple of years and rarely before that, or the Jeri Ryan fansite one at all since 2015… this Elon Musk buying Twitter business reminded me I might as well delete all the Twitter accounts I still had left because I never log in anyway. So they’re all gone now!

If you want to contact me the best way is to do so is to

  1. E-mail me directly at intothisshadow@gmail.com or
  2. Using the form on this page or
  3. Reply to one of the posts here if there’s one with open comment, or
  4. PM me on Dreamwidth if you’re on there, or
  5. To contact me on Tumblr

Those are the places I check daily, or weekly in case of Tumblr (I think Tumblr sends e-mails if you get an Ask? so I should see it the same day). I usually reply within 24 hours but I’m in the GMT+2 timezone so if you’re in the US, it might take a few hours to hear back from me!

Posted on
Oct 4, 2011

Computer Virus

I’ve been dealing with a persistant virus since last Thursday/Friday, and finally had to restore a system image from a few months ago. I believe the virus was eradicated from my laptop (quick scans don’t show anything anymore) by that, but I’m going to let two different antivirus programs as well as Malwarebytes Antimalware and maybe some other antimalware program do full scans of my my laptop and two external hard drives that were plugged when the virus happened before I use FTP or upload any files from my system to my sites. The two external hard drives are really big, so it’ll take several hours (at the very least, 11 hours) to complete one full antivirus/antimalware scan of my system.So it’ll be propably be another couple of days before I do any updates on any sites.

More about the virus: I’m actually unsure whether I had one or two viruses. But whatever, the difficult one was the one called ShortCut virus.What is does is infect USB drives: it hides the folders, creates shortcuts to them but those shortcuts actually lead to the apparently random-named EXE in a new folder called RECYCLER. Luckily I guess, the moment I saw the folders faded and all the shortcuts that shouldn’t be there plus one folder I had not created, so I never did click on any of the shortcuts or anything. Instead I knew I must’ve been hit by a virus and went googling.

No matter what antivirus or antimalware programs I tried to use to remove it, it always was right back after required restart although all the programs had claimed it had been successfully removed, both in Windows Safe Mode and normal mode. It must have resided in the memory or something and the programs didn’t detect all of it properly. In the end, yesterday, I decided to restore the system image I made in June and that seems to have worked because now I could clean up the two USB drives without problems. But like I said, I’m going to let a number of programs make full scans of my system and hard drives  just to be sure.