Hope everyone had a fabulous Halloween!
We stood in line for three hours to vote. Three hours. Although it wasn’t that onerous. The atmosphere was pretty upbeat throughout. There was a certain shared, whoa-can-you-believe-this-three-hours!-wow consternation, but it was good-natured and conducive to camaraderie rather than conflict.
On the very bad, craptacularly wah-some front, one of our external drives died. 250 GBs bit it. Hard. It stopped being detected by fosteronfilm‘s VAIO desktop computer, so we tried it on dude_the‘s Macbook. No go. Then Paul noticed it was making a softly ominous “click-click” noise instead of the gentle “whirr” it’s supposed to make. Very not good.
That drive has a lot of Matthew’s film data on it, and we’re not sure how much of it was backed up or is otherwise replaceable. The hubby was still trying to determine the full contents of that drive when he essentially passed out from exhaustion last night/early this AM.
Unfortunately, while I have computer geek proclivities, they lie, in total, in the area of software. When it comes to hardware, I’m easily confounded, flustered, and distressed—to the point of having to ask for help to plug in a USB thumb drive in one of my not-finer moments at Dragon*Con a couple years back. Yes, I am utterly lame when it comes to cords, plugs, cards, cables, and peripherals.
Paul’s thinking it might be the casing and connection which have belly-upped, so wants to extract the drive from the case and insert it into the computer to see if it’ll register as an internal drive. ‘Course the case appears to be solid-state and will need to be pried open. If that doesn’t work, I guess we have the option of taking it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy to see if they can recover the data. No idea how much that’ll cost or what the chances are of them being able to rescue the contents.
Matthew, understandably, is quite upset.
Writing Stuff
In a belated “OMG, REALLY??” I discovered that “The Center of the Universe” received an Honorable Mention from The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, which come out last July. How did I miss that?? Um, well, late squeeing is still squeeing. *squee!*
I agree on the first step being to try mounting it directly in a computer and hope it’s just the external controller. Second step would be to put it in the freezer for a few hours then try it cold in the computer. Third would be slamming it firmly on a flat surface (this actually works a lot of times…if you have a Dell laptop, it actually has “strike zone” printed on the bottom where you are supposed to whack it).
Good luck.
The idea of a computer “strike zone” makes me boggle like a lilac-haired anime character. To our great relief, we experienced some computer “magic.” wanted to try the drive one more time before prying off the casing, freezing, and whacking it.
He booted up: no drive detection. After a bit, he stepped away to do something else, and when he came back, saw his system spontaneously recognize the drive. That was something like an hour after the initial boot, and he wasn’t doing anything with the computer when it suddenly “healed” itself.
Not questioning. Nope nope. Just thanking the kindly gods who oversee ailing hard drives. Unsurprisingly, he’s been frantically copying the contents of that drive to a different one since then, and it looks like we’ll be able to recover all of it. A world of hurray.
I understand what you’re going through. A week ago my 500gb internal hard drive died. Less than half the data was backed up. I’ve ordered a larger replacement drive, so I’ll be trying to salvage what I can off of the dead one. I’ll be using the “swap controler cards from a previously crashed drive and pray” method. Never done that before, so I’ll be flying blind – so to speak.
Good luck!
Dan
Thanks! We seem to have been smiled upon by the data deities. The hubby’s computer spontaneously recognized the drive in our final “give it one more try” attempt, and it looks likely that we’ll be able to get all the data off without having to engage in any Herculean (and scary) efforts. Whew!
Congrats on the HM!
Wish B was around to rescue the Hard Drive. He’s very good at hardware stuff and keeps saving us from data crashing with his ability to crack open otherwise irredeemable components. Let us know if we need to make a mad dash over to ATL.