Hard drive installed: none.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
(Credit Peter Rothman, with first line altered by me)
Yes, my hard drive died last night. Luckily I backed up the entire drive to my external drive just last week, and also saved all my document, picture, music, and e-mail files at the same time. (Fingers crossed that the fact that I can't turn off the damn external drive right now is just because it has been disconnected abruptly from the dead computer and so is 'thinking' it's still 'in use' -- and NOT because something's screwy with it! Please, please, please!) And I ordered a new hard drive on Amazon last night, which will get here on Monday or Tuesday. This was after Bullock helped me go through all the steps to diagnose the problem and make sure it wasn't just that the hard drive had gotten jostled and disconnected from a proper sitting in the computer. It is a well-traveled notebook, after all. And then he helped me find the right new hard drive at a decent price online. Thanks Bullock!
In the meantime, I can use Bullock's old laptop for accessing those saved files and doing work at home. Right now I'm on his desktop, the only computer with access to the internet in our house at the moment. So it may be a few days before I blog or comment (here or at your blog) or respond to e-mails other than work ones. (I have Eudora on my work computer set up to download only my .edu mail, to keep me honest. And I don't blog from there on principle.)
So the only things I lost aren't a big deal -- annoying, to be sure, but not a big deal: all the damn dates I entered in my calendar for the semester, including the tenure file deadline I finally remembered (but I printed all of that out); a week's worth of e-mail messages (though those sent to the .edu address are still on the server); the updated CV I worked on yesterday for my tenure file (but also printed out); and the 1000-word response I wrote for that article mentioned below (but that's been sent to the volume editors and also printed out for my files).So I am maintaining a Zen-like calm. And now, I'm going for a run.
3 comments:
Eek! Bad hard drive! Bad hard drive!
Good for you to have practiced safe computing. I need to get a new external drive for our home desktops since backing up is becoming more and more of a challenge with the tremendous growth in file size.
Ouch!!! I'm so sorry! You just reminded me that I haven't backed up for a few weeks (although I tend to store copies of my dissertation on multiple drives, in web-based email, campus server, etc - I am paranoid).
Agh. That sucks! I hope the new hard drive works out all right.
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