Computer Woes

Again.

If you were starting to wonder whether I’d fallen off the face of the earth, stop wondering. I’m still here. It’s my main computer’s hard disk that has decided to take an extended leave of absence from work.

It happened on Friday. It was doing four things at once as it usually does and it completely locked up. I had to power it down to unlock it. When I powered it back up, I had a blinking System folder icon. Never a good sign on a Mac.

Long story short: TechTools Pro has been working on the disk for about 37 hours now, trying to recover what was on the disk. It’s not even halfway finished, so I figure it’ll be done by Tuesday or Wednesday. Until it’s done, the computer is pretty much dead in the water. And maybe even after it’s done.

This has happened to me before, so most of my stuff is backed up. But a few things aren’t. Like 4 hours worth of work on Chapter 6 of my Excel 2007 Visual QuickStart Guide. What annoys me most about that is that it was the second time I went to work on that Chapter. The first time, I didn’t like the way it was coming out so I scrapped it.

If the data can’t be recovered by me or by experts elsewhere, I’ll have to rebuild the hard disk’s contents from scratch on a new hard disk. I’ll know if I need to do that sometime near the end of the week.

In the meantime, I have three laptops to work with: My trusty 12-inch PowerBook G4 (which I’m writing on right now), my new MacBook Pro (which is resting until it needs to do duty as a test mule for my upcoming Leopard book), and my Dell laptop (which is what I was running Excel 2007 on while revising my Excel book). So I can keep blogging, keep writing short articles, and write my outline for my Leopard book.

I’m just a bit depressed about the work that faces me and the possibly hundreds of photographs stored only on that computer’s hard disk. I couldn’t back up everything. But that’s going to change very soon.


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2 thoughts on “Computer Woes

  1. Hi Maria,

    I don’t know which you might be referring to as your main computer, but this is what I recommend for your G5: setup a RAID system. RAID 1 allows you to setup 2 mirroring hard drives, so that in case one of them crashed, you’ll still have the other one. And if you replace the bad drive, you can restore your mirror set again.

    For years, I was having problems with Western Digital drives going bad on me, and they were 100-200 gig drives. I also got too busy to do backups of my system. I now have a RAID 1 setup for my PC, so I don’t have to worry about losing data due to HDD failures anymore.

    Hope this helps you,

    Thuy

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