the corner office

Dear Diary

God is out to get me. Short version: my 120GB and my 60GB hard drives at work both decided to die on me yesterday. 60GB drive which normally has my OS etc, wouldn't boot. Managed to plug into another machine and recover data though. Less luck with 120GB, but most files backed up to varying degrees, so no great loss. Except for a couple of of mp3's and a spreadsheet or two from the last week, which I can live without.

The loss of data is thus not the biggie. And normally having a workstation go tits-up is not a biggie, either. (Neither?) We keep spare machines and hard drives. But this was special. The stuff-up after stuff-up after stuff-up after stuff-up that took me from noon yesterday to 5pm today, to recover what data I could and get my machine reinstalled (I lie: just a frigging Notes client up and running), is best not recounted.

But in summary:

• number of skilled IT professionals who wasted varying amounts of time on this: 3

• number of dead hard drives: 2, perhaps 3. Read on...

• number of motherboards discovered to be dodgy (no, not mine: the machine I was planning to use as a 'spare':) 1. Although I can't say I'm comfortable about using a machine that saw two HDD's die at the same time. So perhaps 2.

• number of hard drives which fell right through an anti-static would've-been-a-bag-if-it-weren't-open-on-both-ends, from chest height: 1

• condition of said hard drive after falling from chest height: fine, miraculously. Apart from a bent power pin. Would you trust this drive, though?

• swear-words uttered upon realising that Win2K doesn't have an easily-findable command-line fdisk utility: many. Very, very many.

• number of floppy disks which died trying to create a boot disk: 1. Now it is about 17 little pieces of floppy disk, scattered across the support office.

• number of hours it took to finally notice that GRUB was on the hard drive with the seemingly broken partition tables: about 2, felt like 2,743,849,384

• number of PCs which all (unsuccessfully) played a part in trying to clear partitions on the spare hard drive that turned out to have GRUB on it: 3. Including a Linux box.

• name of little assembler utility finally used clean up the drive's partition table: MBRWIPE.COM. l33t.

• number of errors reported by Windows 2000 while trying to read toasted drive: 0

Yes, that's right dear reader. Windows 2000 seemed to have a difficult time coming to terms with the notion of unreadable disks. While Linux dumped a ton of errors into the system logs, Windows 2000 did nothing of the sort with the same drive. Instead, it sat for hours on end, doing absolutely nothing, while the hard drive churned. And churned. And churned. And churned. XP did more or less the same thing, but seemed a little cleverer at actually reading broken NTFS disks.

I hate Windows, and I hate Maxtor hard drives just as much. I have a ton of mail and blogs and stuff to catch up on, but right now I'm going to curl up in bed, and pretend I'm in a sensory and intellectual deprivation chamber for about a month, or alternatively, as long as Ronwen will let me.