Bad, Bad Day

[filkertom]

External hard drive crash. Not sure how bad yet. Have to check if I backed up iTom songs. I DID back up most everything else about a week and a half ago; I don't THINK there's anything completely irreplacable. But it went down from a stupid chain of events I had no control over, and I'm not happy. More later.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I think the heatwave is responsible. Lots of folks have had meltdowns lately. Heck, in my house, both laptops, the main computer and the PDA all failed within a couple of days last month. The only thing that didn't die was the lab computer (which was off the entire time).

The next computer is going to have a RAID1 array.

Also, you can pull the recent stuff back off the server and onto the computer.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Dunno. What specifically happened was: FireFox decided to crash -- I was trying to download an 8-Pack of loops from acidplanet.com, and it just hung, which is really weird as I've been using the site successfully for five years. Then I decided to reboot, and it took several moments to do so because the .NET framework (aah, thou scumbucket .NET framework, how I hate thee, but some shit won't install without thee) wouldn't close.

I stepped away for a minute while it rebooted, coming back just in time to not be able to stop as it told me it had to verify one of my external drives -- the one I'd been recording with earlier in the day. (Commission job -- thank Cthulhu I'd finished it and got the final high-quality MP3 out.)

It started nuking indexes and finding files it couldn't save -- literally saying it was going to retrieve this file, ohp, sorry, insufficient disk space. (Bull fucking shit. I've got 50+ GB free on this drive. I have 50+ GB free on other drives.) And then it just seemed to sit there. I eventually rebooted, and it wanted to go through the whole thing again. After a third time, I let it.

And now I've unleashed Stellar Phoenix on it, but even that worthy program is taking a hell of a long time to sort through things. I'm very glad I have a laptop; very glad most of my stuff was backed up; hope I don't lose the things I do need.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Sounds to me like the drive lost the ability to write to the platter. You can sometimes restore this by putting the drive in the refrigerator for an hour (add 1/2 hour if it's in a case) and trying again. If this works, then that disk is on its very last legs and needs replacing immediately. Burn all crucial data to a DVDr as soon as the drive is functional again.

The trick doesn't always work - 50/50 chance. But I'll keep my fingers crossed.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I've tried it a time or three, and it's worked a couple of times. I stick my sticky drives in the freezer. Problem is that you have to keep it dry- humidity can mess it up worse when you take it out.