A business client I had dealt with previously, called to say their new computer is no longer starting (something about IDE drive not found).

These people have a 2 month old computer & I previously helped them migrate their outlook settings & fixed a faulty modem, so I had previously opened up the box.

Got there & it looked like the bios couldn’t detect the hard disk… I told them it might be a simple fix, but worst-case, the HDD might have failed, which would probably involve a very tedious re-install of most applications, & a total loss of old emails (they only backup their accounting data). This generated a few shocked looks, but I hope it motivates them to moving to a more comprehensive backup strategy (I’m happy to help them implement a simple DVD backup, but the important thing is to get a good backup happening, regardless who does it).

Fortunately, I just had to unplug & re-insert the SATA plug, & everything was back to normal.

Its just odd that this happened soon after I had fix another problem for them (i had swapped modem cards, but didn’t touch the SATA cords).

I just hope they are not the “suspicious” types and think I had sabotaged their computer the first time, in order to get a second callout. I prefer to do just 1 good job, in order to maximise referrals.

Anyway, I did my best, so I’m not going to worry much about what others might think of me.