Go the "A disk read error occurred" error at Windows startup!!!

As usual, I turned on my PC today when I woke up. Went to the kitchen and came back to the PC to find out that the PC hasn't booted into Windows yet. In fact, it was halted at the boot loader saying that it cannot find the boot loader.

I hit the reset button but there was no change. So I went into the BIOS and checked what's up with the boot drives. For some reason, the boot drive was changed to my Toshiba data drive from my usual Samsung SSD drive. I set it back to my SSD and the I got the following screen.

I panicked. This SSD is a new drive and it only has TLC flash. This is the first of its kind so naturally there should be unforeseen issues. I thought this was one of it. The mind runs too fast. I was already thinking about how I'm gonna RMA the drive and how I'm gonna use the PC without the SSD. I thought I would have o install Windows onto the data drive and etc. etc. Then I snapped out of that thought and came back to the real world.

I don't have to think about RMAing anything just yet. There are so many things that I can do before getting there. First I checked if there was a loose connection between the SSD and the motherboard. Didn't appear to be so, but I unplugged and replugged the cable. That allowed me to load the Windows boot screen but even after a minute, Widows didn't fully boot into the desktop. I knew something was up. It should have booted within 10 seconds. I was still scared.

I had a spare SATA cable lying around. So I replaced the old one with this one and guess what happened? Everything was back to normal. Phew! Why do all these cables go kaput?

Note: 

Because of the problems with the SATA cable, the SSD had not been detected the first time thus BIOS had automatically changed the default boot drive from the SSD to the next drive in the order of the SATA port.

Guess I would stick with Apple after all

In the last couple of weeks, we were having trouble with my wife’s iPhone 4S’s earpiece. We did everything we could from out end, but it didn’t heal. It didn’t heal by itself either. So finally we decided to get the Genius Bar involved.

I called the Apple Support center and they came to the conclusion that they may have to replace the handset. There were two options. I could either tell them to pick the phone up free of charge (pretty cool, ha?) or I could head to an Apple Store. If they picked it up, it would take up to a week to get things resolved. I could not take that option. My wife has to go to work. There are a million things that can go wrong in an event of a big incident. So she had to have her phone with her at all times she was out of the house.

So it was decided that we went to an Apple Store. There were two Apple Stores close to our apartment. One in Shibuya and one in Ginza. Both were within an hour of travel time. Shibuya was closer and in addition to that, we were planning to attend the Sri Lankan Festival 2012 which was only a walking distance from the Shibuya station. So without further ado, we decided to pay a visit to the Apple Store in Shibuya.