CRASH!
Posted in OAImages News by John E. Pannell on January 31st, 2008 at 3:14 am “May you live in interesting times.
May you come to the attention of those in authority.
May you find what you are looking for.”
— Reputed Chinese Curses
I learned lots of things on Wednesday. The technology demons were working overtime to haunt and bedevil me. Mr. Murphy also made an appearance to demonstrate to me his eponymous aphorism.
It started innocently enough. A friend was coming over to install some lighting in my den for me. I needed to learn which circuit breaker would turn off the power to my den. In the process of making that discovery, I also learned which would turn off the power to my office. That’s when things started going badly.
The next discovery was that unbeknownst to me the UPS I have my two desktop computers plugged into apparently has a dead battery.
My next learning experience was finding out the older of the two computers would not reboot. This is the machine I connect to when at work. It’s the machine where I store all the images folks have sent me that are not yet on the site. It’s also the computer I use for email. Recently I have been receiving a large amount of images from various folks. A lot of them were still in my Outlook inbox and I had yet to acknowledge their receipt.
We got the lights installed without any further problem. They look good and also better enable me to spy on my cat via webcam when I’m at work. We were unable to get the computer to reboot: the primary hard drive appeared to be malfunctioning.
I next learned how to open my newer computer and install the secondary drive from my older machine into the newer one. I also learned, that for some reason, the newer computer would not read this slave drive as a slave on the new machine unless I first removed a jumper. Then I was able to copy the data. All the images I had saved, but not yet added are recovered along with a bunch of other stuff of mine.
The primary hard drive still presents me additional learning opportunities. I have been taught — as odd as it might seem — that sometimes you can recover data from a stubborn harddrive by first chilling it in the freezer. That has not yet helped. I’m hoping it did not have ample time to cool down sufficiently and will try again later today. This is the hard drive that contained most of the software stored on my older desktop computer, along with my saved email (and all those image attachments I mentioned) and Outlook address book. I’m am hoping some way to recover at least the email and address book can be found.
I have learned that now is probably the time I take the plunge and retired my older desktop computer. I have also learned that I really should have bought that external hard drive I was eyeing a few days ago for use as additional backup storage.
My learning experiences were by no means confined to matters dealing with computers and this site. Suffice to say, I have learned lots of other things over the past 36 hours, most of which were not pleasurable.
If you have sent me images recently, please do not resend them at this time. If I have acknowledged receiving them, then the files have been safely recovered and will be added to the site in due course. If I haven’t acknowledge you, please give me time to see if I can recover my saved email. If you are awaiting a response from me to a question, you might want to write me again or just be patient and see if I can reccover the contents of that primary hard drive.
This is the first time in over 20 years that a personal computer of mine has crashed, and not been easily fixed. I am not happy to have broken that streak.
Life is a continuous learning experience.
Get a Mac!
Why did I know that’s was Kevin would say?