eor: (Default)
eor ([personal profile] eor) wrote2006-08-29 06:23 pm
Entry tags:

and then I breathed

Yesterday as I was struck by the coincidence of three things: I clicked on what looked like a promising link in the search for a bit of information on the web, the refrigerator kicked on, my computer blackscreened and proceeded to reboot. I hmmm'd and watched it go through the reboot process. When it came back, I logged in and started X windows. As soon as I did X closed and dropped me at the steady old prompt and I started getting system errors ending in the phrase "Danger Will Robinson!!" No kidding, that's what they said, you gotta love programmers with a sense of humor. It wouldn't take input, just kept giving me that. Well, the power switch still worked.

So, I rebooted again, started in single user mode and cleaned the disks. Through the whole thing I was getting errors reading the hard drive. Hundreds. This is where I get paranoid. It would only take me a week to rebuild the system and reinstall the programs but I've got 60 gigs of data and programs it took months of work to write on there. I was going insane.

When it finally marked the disks clean I shut it down immediately and turned on the wiindoze box and started looking at the price of hard drives. This shows you how shook I was. Later, after I had calmed down a bit I realized how silly it was. The motherboard could just as easily be the culprit. I went through looking at hard drives, motherboards, even whole systems. Then I slowed down and thought. Well, maybe now that it's cooled down I'll see if it's okay.

It didn't turn on. I smiled. Of course, I was so stupid. If it doesn't turn on after such weird behavior it's a loose cable that has now become a disconnected cable. I pushed all the cables in securely. It started right up again without a problem or complaint.

I started breathing again.

Oh, I did order a drive today. I'll stick it and keep an archive of the data directories and the programs I've written.

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