It's a man with nothing to lose who ends up losing nothing

[lizblackdog]

Cleaning several pints of liquid laundry detergent off my bathroom floor, my kitchen floor, my hallway floor and my disconsolate sticky pointer before my second cup of coffee is not my idea of a good start to any day.

Just sayin'.

Also, my biggest hard drive imploded. Or something. It's always been rather prone to take sudden temperamental fits and unilaterally wipe great swathes of data, which is why I never put anything irreplaceable on it. I R SMRT. But this is new. I tried to save something to it yesterday morning to be told it's now under the impression it has never been formatted.

This is a lie, because there was a shitton of stuff saved to it. I don't want to format it if there's any other way round it, because although all that data IS replaceable, it would be a pain and take a long time. Anyone got any thoughts?

Edited to add: Also, I am out of sugar even though I went shopping yesterday. *sigh*

Comments

[topbit.livejournal.com]

oh crap.

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

that drive's always been a bit flaky.

think I should format it?

[topbit.livejournal.com]

It may well be possible to get stuff off there, but I can't get down there for a little while to find out. I'm more interested why it failed though. If we get you a new one, I will make it an external drive, plugged in via USB. It will be a lot slower, but then you can just use it for storage and turn it off when you don't need it.

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

I don't deserve you, that's what.

[mcsassypants.livejournal.com]

I'm no help on the computer front. I hope your day gets better! I'd mail you some sugar, but I'm guessing that you'd have some by the time the package arrived...

[mcsassypants.livejournal.com]

Also: "mail you some sugar" sounds like a euphemism for something else.

This might mean that I should have stolen more sips of coffee from Ryan this morning...

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

*snrk*

I have this weird blind spot with sugar. Almost everything else, I manage to buy more before I completely run out - but sugar gets me every time. I never seem to be able to buy more till I've spent a morning sweetening my coffee with marmalade in desperation.

(don't do this. Molasses, maple syrup, golden syrup and strawbery jam all work all right but marmalade in coffee is just gross.)

[mcsassypants.livejournal.com]

I can see the molasses, maple syrup and golden syrup working. I'm a bit surprised by the strawberry jam, although, I suppose Russian tea is sweetened with currant jelly, so it makes sensed in a round about mcsassypants logic sort of way. I can see how marmalade would be a bad idea.

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

the strawberry jam wasn't particularly nice. but it was drinkable, and slightly better than unsweetened coffee or artifical sweetener.

Marmalade was just too bitter on top of the coffee's bitter.

If I had milk I could stand to drink my coffee unsweetened. But I never have milk either - the amount I use if I have any is so small that I eliminated it from my diet rather than buy it and throw half of every carton away.

[mcsassypants.livejournal.com]

See, this is where roommates are useful. We never run out of sugar because auntieturtle79 insists on it in her coffee every morning. By the time I start to think "Oh, hey. We should probably put sugar on the grocery list", she's already purchased a giant bag of it.

Of course, the disadvantage of roommates is that there is never such a thing as a no pants day anymore...
And I mean that in the English AND American definition of the word.

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

I often think wistfully of the usefulness of roommates. I would have a dogsitter.

But then I remember all my friends' roommate horror stories - and besides, I am an annoying messy slob who plays music 24/7, won't wear headphones and likes to take spontaneous baths at 4am on my insomniac nights. Any roommate not actually married to me would have murdered me from sheer irritation by now.

[mcsassypants.livejournal.com]

Honestly, there are days when I'm shocked that auntieturtle79 hasn't murdered me in my sleep by now. I'm not especially diligent about dishes and she's diagnosed OCD. Not to mention my giant mood swings, even when I'm not pregnant (I usually hate the world and everyone in it about an hour before a meal).
Of course, I usually want to throttle her about once a week or so because of her very, very odd way of cleaning (she'll do dishes, but won't bother with wiping down the counters afterwards. And puts clearly empty food jars back in the cupboard or fridge because she thinks we'll still use it).
It helps that I've known her since high school and she's one of my closest friends. I wouldn't recommend roommates that you don't know already.

[mudshark58.livejournal.com]

Cleaning several pints of liquid laundry detergent off my bathroom floor, my kitchen floor, my hallway floor and my disconsolate sticky pointer before my second cup of coffee is not my idea of a good start to any day.

I don't suppose there's video of how that situation came to be?


Not sure what to tell you on the hard-disk front, except that it sounds like an important label has gotten a bit smudged, and you'll probably need input from someone with some tech credentials and a non-trivial disk utility program to see what might be recovered and copied to more reliable media.

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

No video, but I can give you the action replay: Someone knocked the bottle onto its side last night, and the cap was either not on tightly enough or is a shitty cap. Went for a morning piss and there was a pool of the stuff on the bathroom floor.

Now, I cannot go for a piss without all the dogs and cats following me into the bathroom. Squish walked through the detergent pool and tracked it all through the flat before I got hold of him and washed it off.

But I won. I used several items of dirty laundry to mop the detergent pool up, and then I dropped them all in hot water, so they get washed and I didn't waste any. :D

[mudshark58.livejournal.com]

Win! :D

[revolution-grrl.livejournal.com]

Cleaning several pints of liquid laundry detergent off my bathroom floor, my kitchen floor, my hallway floor and my disconsolate sticky pointer before my second cup of coffee is not my idea of a good start to any day.

This is a wild guess here, but was said pointer involved in the creation of the Situation?

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

Amazingly, considering Squish's record, probably not. It could have been any of me or the dogs that knocked it over in the first place - it did a sort of slow leak all night. Squish was just the unlucky one who walked through the puddle of it.

*Edited because I used the wrong icon. And because I can. XD *

[mwenyekischaa.livejournal.com]

There might be some problem with your drive overheating. That can produce seemingly random read/write or access errors for a time, and eventually hard drive failure. My advice would be to disconnect it so it doesn't come on anymore when your machine starts, and wait until someone with a disk utlity, as mentioned by another above, can have a look. The error message you got, especially if it happens every time you access the drive even if you've just turned on your machine, sounds like the partition table got wiped or corrupted, which means it may not be salvageable. (The partition table is the bit that tells the drive where data is stored on the drive.) Even if you reformat a similar error will probably happen again somewhere down the line.

If it's the boot sector, then nothing at all can be done, but you'll only know that if you do try to reformat. It'll tell you the drive isn't ready or can't be found or somesuch. Whee.

To solve any overheating problems - put more cooling fans in the computer case, or use an external drive like that other guy said. O.o Lack of an adequate number of fans in the case is what made my last drive die. I'm thinking part of the problem could also be your lack of air conditioning, which means heat will build up faster, and may be made worse by humidity, which can make computers freak out. That's why many office buildings are kept kinda frigid, it keeps the machinery at a reasonable temperature, for them, even if people are freezing their butts off. (g)

[santaman.livejournal.com]

Nope, even if a harddrive at the brink of melting it still won't give you these kinds of errors, if a drive really overheats then you will hear a loud click and the drive will stop working until you switch off the computer and let the thing cool down.. this is from an experience I made with a goofball who sandwiched two 80Gb drives into a single drive cage, both drives were so hot that my colleague got blisters on the palm of his hand...

[mwenyekischaa.livejournal.com]

Eh, with my older drive I was told its death was hastened by overheating and lack of ventilation. The semi-random and progressive errors of the sort you get when a drive is dying showed up less than a year after I bought the thing, anyway, and the repair fellow I took it to said it may have been running too hot too long. It had started doing the clicking-and-shutting off thing just before I finally took it in to find out what the hell was going on. (g)

[santaman.livejournal.com]

As long its not running much above 36c-37c then all is okay. :)
Ventilation and cool air is a good thing for a computer though, for the other parts like the processor and mainboard the cooler they are the better it is. :)

[santaman.livejournal.com]

Your drive is on the way out I'm afraid, I've had a few drives pulling the same crap on me and they all failed within the month so make a big backup and get a new drive, this is the worst case scenario btw and it might be not that bad at all.

Middle worst case scenario is that the partition(s) information has been damaged, in that case a reformat is not going to cut it, you will have to whipe everything off the drive including the partition(s) and then start entirely over from scratch meaning you have to get a partition manager to setup new partition(s) and then go from there.

Less middle worst case scenario, cheapest and easiest to fix, check the IDE cable that connects the drive to the mainboard, if you don't trust it or want to be sure then replace the damn thing, also unplug and re-plug the power connector, it might have been not seated properly.

Least worst case scenario, you need to reformat the drive only, this is however not likely...