I was in Best Buy the other night returning some merchandise and ran across the Geek Squad trying to fix one of their customer’s problems. The poor Geek Squad tech was plugging and unplugging a drive, refreshing My Computer and the drive wouldn’t show up. To a professional technician, this is a 1-minute fix. Unfortunately, this technician couldn’t seem to fix it and his Geek Squad screen wasn’t telling him all the details.

In more detail, you plug in a USB hard drive, Windows states that it found the hardware, installs the software and you get a “It’s ready to use”, but when you go into My Computer, it doesn’t show up.

Well, here’s a secret for all of you that have this problem:
Right Click on “My Computer”, select “Manage”. Go to the Disk Management section and you’ll see a disk that’s there, that is the size that you just plugged in, but no drive letter. (Disclaimer, this next part: Use at your own risk as there is potential for loss of data if done wrong) Right click on the drive, choose “Format” and go through the prompts (choose NTFS). Within a minute, your drive will be in My Computer, as it should be. Again, use the above at your own risk, because you could wipe a perfectly valid hard drive…

Why does this happen?
Every once in awhile, a hard drive makes it out of a manufacturers facility without being pre-formatted for you. It happens, on occasion for some odd reason. Another valid reason is that the hard drive was replaced at some point, either by someone else, or by the manufacturer and it wasn’t reformatted as it should have been.

I’d like to take some time today to ask that some of you be a little careful with your prized computers…

We got called to a customer site by a customer that was riding the Max and bumped his bag on his way off the train. The laptop was in a backpack, and was “protected”. Needless to say, he got a hefty scare when he got inside his office and found the laptop wouldn’t boot up.

Once we arrived, we quickly found that the laptop had been jarred hard enough to have a memory chip pop out of place (no small feat, since they’re locked in with metal clips). Luckily for him, this 3 minute fix left the computer running once again. We didn’t even charge for the job since the fix was so fast (we may have a 1 hour minimum, but we’re not going to rip you off).

So, the moral of today’s story is to be careful. If you’re using a backpack to haul around a computer, which all of our technicians personally do, please use a laptop backpack. These have padded sleeves inside of them that are hidden, but allow the laptop to feel a little more comfy inside.

Oh, and NEVER put your laptop to sleep or let it hibernate inside your bag – Roasted Laptop anyone?
Justin