Remember that brand, spanking new computer I built back in September?
Mom got up this morning and flipped it on like she always does. She usually gets up 1 – 3 hours before we even begin to regain consciousness and checks her e-mail and does a little genealogy research. She got up this morning, flipped it on… and nothing.
A message appears asking for boot media. She then does the good thing my mommy has always done: Wakes me up to deal with it.
I think “Bios must have updated.” It does have the occasional habit of deciding it needs to boot the portable hard drive instead of the main drive. (I don’t have bootable media on it.) No, that’s not it. Maybe a cable died. Nope. Eventually, I get a message saying “No any hard drive detected.” Oh, frig. (Any other time I probably would have been chuckling at the bad grammar.) Nothing I tried could get that stupid hard drive to boot. There was no noise, no smell, no visible damage, nothing to indicate a problem. The activity light would light right up, I could feel and hear the disk spinning. But the bios will in no way recognize my precious hard drive. Only comment my mom made was that it “sounded louder than usual” when she turned it on. (Which isn’t all that helpful, considering how many fans and heat sinks are in it.)
So, I drag my old Compaq granny machine out and hit my guildies up for advice. (Ugh, that thing is so slow compared to my baby.) All their troubleshooting advice fails to work too. Finally Kel and Rasm began posting links and I discover that my particular hard drive model is prone to bad heads and firmware failure. (Seagate Barracuda 7200.11) I’m pretty sure I would have heard bad heads, which likely means firmware failure.
I told mom on her way to work to ask Craig if he could take me to Best Buy to see if they had something cheap. No problem, plus Jeremy told me they had one for $79. Good. Gets me to tax returns, when I can drop the money on a proper hard drive.
The loss of data is actually not a big deal. I really didn’t lose too much, thanks to backups. I had all my MP3s on my portable hard drive and all my college homework is also on my portable hard drive and the older stuff burned onto DVDs. Big thing I lost was all my fonts, our resumes, and all our e-mail. I still have to go to the Seagate site and see if I can download a few utilities… maybe see if I can slave the old drive to the new one. Really, I can’t think of anything aside from our fonts and the e-mail that’s a critical loss. The fonts and resumes aren’t even really that critical… though I can’t find some of my fonts anymore.
The big deal is that I’m going on 8 hours reinstalling everything from the operating system to my programming utilities to my games. Course, World of Warcraft is going to want to patch for another 5 hours. I’m also not looking forward to installing Visual Studio and MSDN. *shudders*
The instructions are basically: “Remove your old card, put in new card. Restart system, let Windows recognize it, then install the included driver disk.”