Ode to a dead hard drive

I’ve dedicated today to doing general fix-up and cleaning of computer systems, in yet another attempt at making my computing life smooth and trouble-free. Alas, the computer gods laugh at this kind of hubris, so Estrella, one of the drives in Monolith, decided to give up the ghost.

Rebooted the computer to boot to an install CD and was greeted by the horrible sound of a ping-pong ball bouncing around a metal cage. Urgh. Estrella is no more. It’s not even showing up on the bus. Looks like all I lost was a bunch of mp3s and my twisted collection of alert sounds. I hope. Estrella was mostly a backup drive, which is kind of spooky as it means I’m now in the middle of an install without a safety net. Not a good thing.

Estrella was one of my oldest hard drives, so I guess it was getting to be time for it to die, but it’s always a bit shocking when a drive fails utterly and catastrophically without any kind of warning. Just poof. Stricken down by a bolt of lightning.

Note to self: Always take backups on optical media of everything important. Do not trust hard drives. Go to tattoo shop and engrave this on your chest.

Am thinking now that it might be a good idea to plunder the 80 gig drive that sits in the Windows XP/Linux box, use it to replace Estrella, and put in an old ghetto 40 gigger in the Windows XP/Linux box. This will of course mean a reinstall, which sucks. Will not put Linux back. Face it, Mac OS X gives me all the Unix goodness I need. Don’t really need to have Windows XP either, except for browser compatiblity tests and video conferencing with the folks. For which I wouldn’t need the Windows box if I only bought an iSight and the iSight works okay with Yahoo! Messenger. Hmmm…

Music: Couch posting in eerie silence while the installer does its thing.

Posted Monday, 20 October, 2003 by Nic Lindh

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