Tannishblog

I was just sitting here minding my own business, doing my nightly blogging run, when all of a sudden my computer locked up (gasp!). I had a Washington Post article about our administration’s group hallucinations loading, choice fodder for tannishblog, when the cursor froze. Upon pressing the reset button, I watch carefully as my computer goes through its post routine:

DETECTING IDE DRIVES…

That’s where it stopped. Two minutes passed as I stared at the screen hoping against hope that the lines upon it would start moving again. No such luck. Reset again; same results.

At this time I start cataloging in my head all the photos, music, and documents I’ve collected on this machine. Before you ask – no, I don’t have a backup set. This computer doesn’t have a RAID array, either. With a resigned sigh, I unplug the beast; take it to my workstation in the basement, and start tearing it down. As an enthusiast, I have inherited many of my friends’ old machines, of which I still have many loose pieces. I plug in an old 6.5GB drive and fire the sucker up. It boots fine. For good measure, I try another older and smaller drive: This one still has WIN95 on it, which boots quick and easy.

After spraying all the cat hair and dust bunnies out of it with compressed air (I know…), I take a chance and hook up the original drive. At this point, I’m already resigned to shelling out a hundred or so in a new drive and mourning the loss of precious data. I envision myself cramming until midnight to load software and tweak the machine until it purrs.

Then the stupid thing boots like it’s supposed to. If it had a face, it would be smirking at me.

Now I begin my overdue archiving project. How should I do this: burn a bunch of CDs and try to keep them organized, or take one of the old hard drives, hook it up to the second IDE port and copy the file onto it? The first is safer and much slower than the second option. I think I’ll do both for extra safety. And start shopping for a new, larger disk – just in case.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Geekosity, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.