I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid You Can’t Do That.
What’s the problem with technology? Specifically mine.
A month or so ago, one Tuesday or Wednesday when the heat index hit 45 - that’s Celsius for all my American fans, whatever it is in Fahrenheit you must figure out for yourselves, consider it an intellectual exercise, which would be something new to some of you…
Where was I?
Yeah. Technology. 45 Celsius. Both my computers crashed that day. I have no air-conditioning; both machines have two case fans each plus the power supply fan. I had the cases open and an oscillating floor fan and a small desktop fan aimed at them.
The monitor on one started to futz and while I was thinking WTF, the other machine just stopped, then the first one did.
When they finally recovered, my 8 gig harddrive was being reported by Win2K’s Recovery Console as being two 200 gig drives (yes, I counted very carefully) with 2 8 meg unformatted partitions. When I rebooted again, the drive was back to normal size, but it had no file system. I didn’t lose a lot of apps, but almost all of my ill-gotten mp3s. Shows to go ya.
Since then, there have been nothing but problems, except when there weren’t of course, but mild hyperbole tells the story, not objective clinical description of my day-to-day computering without the rancour.
I lost one small, old harddrive without about half of a friend’s fortieth birthday project on it. They were sound files some of which were a bitch to produce in the first place - long story, remind to tell you some time - but I did.
Also lost in the first big crash was a collection of sound effects files from library CDs. The collections were cool; horror movie noises, sci-fi, general, that sort of thing. Some of the sci-fi files were to be used in the birthday project, so I tried to fake them up, failing miserably - but learning a bit in the process.
After many, probably weather-related problems and one or two stupid-user caused problems (hardware reconfig; this processor with that memory, this DVD-ROM on that machine), things finally stabilized and I was able to finish the project, late, and of less than sterling quality, but rockin’ nevertheless.
I was away house-sitting for most of last week at Elvis and Cordelia’s house in Scarborough. I’d left my machines on but came back specifically to turn them off and close my windows when we were expecting the tail end of Hurricane Dennis to hit us, which it didn’t.
I got back home on Saturday, booted up my machines, only to find that the one that I play DVDs on had lost its virtual memory. This caused a cascade of other problems, not the least of which was that I couldn’t restore the virtual memory settings because it was too slow to work. Nrgl!
I had to reinstall Windows 2000 on that machine and then restore all the apps as well.
Now I hate doing all this crap all the time, but truth be told, I always learn something. It might only save five minutes off recovering from the next catastrophic collapse, but hey, five minutes here, five minutes there, pretty soon you’re down to no catastrophe at all.
If only real life could really be like that, really. And civilization.
Yeah, I wish.
July 29th, 2005 at 10:46 am
This sounds like a job… for LINUX!
How is the Linux install goin’?
July 29th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Ah, glad you reminded me. I gave it its own harddrive set it to installing overnight, it was very slow and found it had failed when I got up and checked it.
I rebooted the machine, found that the boot sector of the system drive had been corrupted or otherwise altered and repaired that, then found that the system couldn’t find an OS, so I had to reinstall W2k AGAIN.
I wiped out the failed installation and gave the HDD back to Windows.
So I am going to rebuild a PII I took apart for parts a few months ago and install it there, add it to the network, download an appropriate PHP processing module thingy and play around.
Up until the other day, it was too goddam hot to be pissing around up to my elbows in computer guts to bother, but now that it’s cooler, I’ll get to it in the next week or so.