If Lois Lerner's Computer Gave Her The "Blue Screen of Death," As a Witness Claims, That Means The Data On It The Hard Drive Was Probably Recoverable

From Megan McCardle at Bloomberg News.

[T]he Blue Screen of Death is an operating system error. The operating system lives on the hard drive. Which raises a question: If Lerner’s hard drive was so thoroughly malfunctioning that no one could even get the data off of it, how was it booting up far enough for the operating system to malfunction? This is not the description of the problem that I would have expected to hear; I would have expected to hear that her computer wouldn’t really boot up at all, perhaps while horrible grinding noises emanated from its innards. In most cases, a computer displaying the Blue Screen of Death is a computer with a hard drive functioning well enough for data recovery. If I were Lerner's IT support person, I would waste no time in getting the hard drive to a working computer, where I’d connect it as a secondary drive and transfer off all the files, because the Blue Screen of Death is often a harbinger of future hard drive failure. But it was not, in my experience, usually a symptom of the actual failure.

Hmmmm, so what lie are they going to try next.

BTW, as a guy who has fixed a few computers myself, McCardle's solution to the problem is exactly what I would have done. It does not explain, however, how all the data on the backup system was lost.