Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Man down... Kicking in progress...

I make a to-do list every day, it is in fact one of the few good habits I possess. Occasionally when I feel stretched particularly thin I'll add "Relax" as an item on that list. I find that often one has to focus on disappating stress and anxiety, thus the "Relax" as an item to be done. I assume that by putting it down on my to-do list yesterday that I invoked some kind of Murphy Demon who made sure that yesterday was anything but relaxing...

Surprisingly work was not the anti-relaxent, it wasn't till I got home that horrible things started happening. I was sitting in the office, and a heard a whir-click, whir-click sound coming from the wife's computer. I knew that wasn't a good sound so I tried waking it up, I tried ctrl-alt-del... nothing... so I powered it down. After letting it sit for an hour or two I powered it back up. It was still making that sound and when it came to that part in the bios where it looks for the IDE... yeah it didn't find it. Well suppossedly all the data from that computer was on the D drive, if the computer won't boot, one assumes it's the C drive, so I was optimistic that I'd be able to slap the D drive into my computer it would boot and we wouldn't lose any data. I think long time readers of my blog may know where I'm going with this...

So I took the computer apart blew out all the dust and pulled the hard drives, took what I assumed was the C drive (based on the jumpers) and tossed it in the freezer. The freezer thing is ridiculed by many as voodoo, but it's my default action in a case like this and I've had good luck with it. I think more alarming is the fact that I have a default action for these events. I then tossed the remaining HD into my computer. As soon as I started it up I heard the whir-click. Obviously I had the wrong hard drive, so I quickly powered down and grabbed the other drive from the freezer. As I booted up with the second drive I once again heard a whir-click (though not as loud as with the first drive). I was already down, this is when the kicking commenced...

In the end neither drive would mount on my computer and now both are in the freezer waiting their hoped for resurrection. I'm still not sure what external factor caused both hard drives to fail at the same time, and I'm sure that I'm missing some piece of the puzzle, and don't even get into the overwhelming stupidity of not having a backup, cause then I'd have to kill you.

In search of relaxation

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Freezing the hard drive really works?
I thought it was an urban legend.

Let us know how it works out, I might have to e-mail Myth busters.

Who backs up data at home??

4:50 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was going to say the same thing about Mythbusters...

When I had a PC, I never backed up home stuff, because I never did anything important. I tended to reformat everything and start over every few months anyway.

I always liked ghosting the hd and copying it to a cd right after install. You get a nice, clean machine ready to go.

7:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I double backup all of my important stuff at home...pictures etc. But then I'm not a computer expert so when my computer crashes I have to just start over instead of freezing my hard drive and fixing it...I guess now Ross will put a contract out on my life :-)

Fred

12:53 AM  
Blogger aozora said...

The up-side is if the freezer thing doesn't work out, you can do the cryonic thing and leave them frozen until medi-, er, computer technology advances to the point where you can beam the data off with quantum science.

3:06 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have dibs on Fred's computers (and backups) when Ross has him killed.

9:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wait another brother-in-law, like are they infinity replacable?

4:03 PM  

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