Ok, next time my brother has computer problems, remind me not to make fun of him.
He’s a windows and OSX user, and his windows box was being dumb…since he was coming to town, he decided to bring it with him so the guy he bought it from (a friend of mine who I’ve been buying HW from for the last 12 years or so) could take a look at it and do whatever he thought necesary. I, of course, made lots of fun about it, since the problem ended up being…windows :) Anyway, he spent a week here, and left this past saturday, after much mocking by me. About 20 minutes after he leaves for the airport, I sit at my computer, and realize that amarok is doing weird things…mmm…strange…then I run something else (don’t even remember what) and…get an error….curioser and curioser…I take a look at /var/log/messages and…the HD that had the OS installed in was dead! I had about 1 gig of “hda seek error” in my logs, the damn thing was dead :(
This was a 3 or 4 year old 120Gb disk, and…I never really trusted it. For some strange reason, I never decided to stick actual data in it, it was just for / and that was it…my /home and /var partitions where in other HDs…which ended up being a good thing.
So…I had to get a new HD in this box…problem being that I’m broke lol! So…into the big box of spare HW I went…and found a 45Gb disk…what to do, what to do? Well…clone the data from the HD (160Gb) in my wintendo (my old desktop box, which now has windows in it so I can play Age of Empires III and Rome: Total War) to the 45Gb disk, move the 160Gb disk to my linux box and install linux in it. Easy, right? Except…
I use reiserfs in my linux box, which means I can’t access it from windows…which has never been an issue, because I’ve never dualbooted. If I have a spare desktop, like now, I run windows on it so I can play some games…but the moment I think of something actually useful to do with it, I format it and stick linux in it :) So…what was the problem? well…I didn’t have a liveCD linux anywhere…except for the 3 ISOs in my linux box…which meant, no way to clone the stupid windows box.
Had to search the web, find a commercial program with a time-limited-but-full-featured trial version for download and use that to do the cloning. It was a royal PITA, and now I have a liveCD burned and in a safe place in case I ever need it again.
Lesson learned? Keep a liveCD at hand at all times, follow your instincts when a piece of HW doesn’t “feel” reliable, and, most important, don’t make fun of my brother when he’s having computer problems…he’ll put the evil eye on my computer and make me suffer :(
Technorati Tags: dead hd, computer curse, linux livecd
Tags: Thoughts
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!!
