It's been awhile since I've had serious computer problems, almost a year since I lost a harddrive. I even went so far as to brag to a friend at work regarding my good luck with harddrives. Then it happened. Our multimedia computer (the one attached to the tv for movies, tv shows, music, etc.) started acting funny. A scan of one of the 120 gig Maxtor drives turned up bad sectors. crap.. oh well, "no big deal" I thought. I ran out and got a new 160gig drive, and with 500+gigs of space and a dvd burner, it was easy to back everything up, and my losses were minimal. But then one of the other 120gig drives started acting up. So I moved stuff off that onto the other 160gig drive. And discovered that the 120gig was using an old, probably bad/lowspeed cable. So I got a new cable, wiped the 40gig operating system drive, and reinstalled windows, and moved files around, trying to repartition harddrives for the best performance. Then absolute disaster struck. The 160gb Western Digital drive I backed everything up to (it was completely full) just plain fucked up. My guess is that windows being the shitty operating system it is, couldn't handle the size of the drive with the default drivers. To make a long story short, I lost virtually everything on that 160 gig drive. Music, movies, all my programming from school, all my computer backups for the past 4 years, several projects, a large collection of operating systems, applications, and more. I'm trying not to think of everything I lost cause it just depresses me. Luckily I was able to save our entire digital photo album, which was the most important thing on that computer.
So now I have a ton of harddrive space free, which is nice when you don't think of how I got that much space. But I'm stress-testing the harddrives before I put any data on them now. In order to do that I'm downloading as much as possible to fill up 450+gigs of space. So far in two days I'm at 52gigs. *sigh* Time to look into a more automated way to safely backup my stuff.
The good news out of all this though is that it convinced Britni to let me install linux on the multimedia station instead of windows. If I do get around to doing that, that would leave only a few computers left to convert away from windows. Currently I have my main desktop running gentoo, my web/ftp/etc server running gentoo, my router/firewall running coyote linux, my laptop on Win2k, my carputer on winxp due to available software, and brit's comp on winxp. With the multimedia station, we'd hit the 50% linux mark. :)
Did you have Windows MCE on it? You should try that on the carputer, I'd bet it'd fucking rock for a stereo.
Posted by: Justin at August 29, 2004 11:35 AM