Hrm, where to begin. I guess I'll start with the prevalent theme of this week. Once again I've proved to myself that all of my expertise in computers comes not one iota from any intelligence on my part, but rather from a strange miasma of stubborness and the delightful ability to break everything I touch; leavened with a hint of fiscal limitations. (bad word there, 'limitations', but it's the best I could come up with.
So the hard drive in my laptop begins to die like it's been threatening to for over a year now, so I figure I'll get SDS to order me a replacement, image the drive, and be on my way.
RIIIIIIIIGGGGHHHTT
wtf was I thinking? This is me, I'm a computer tech, I know these things. What follows is the story of my hard drive saga:
Sunday evening I turn on the laptop and am greeted with the error message, "HEY FUCKO! REAPLCE YOUR HARD DRIVE OR LOSE ALL YOUR SHIT!" (paraphrased to remove all technno-babble) Being the smart person that I am, I continue right on past and keep using the computer as-is (gotta make that money in MTGO right?).
Monday morning comes and I call SDS (the people at work who handle such things). Everything appears all good-in-the-hood and whatnot, and they tell me a new drive should be here tomorrow for me. I continue to work the rest of the day because hey! it hasn't crashed yet, and I do have all my data backed up. If it dies I can deal with it.
Tuesday was the glorious day of getting my new hard drive. Except it never came. I worked all day on the teetering precipice of "OH FUCK WHAT DOES THAT BLANK SCREEN MEAN". Then, miraculously, five minutes before I left for the day Pat (SDS monkey, nice guy though) calls me to tell me the new drive has arrived. It's a bit late in the day for me to make any progress on the situation, so I tell him that I'll pick it up in the morning. At this point I still naively believe that I'm going to just clone the old drive to the new in a short amount of time and be on my way. Ahh, the bliss of innocence. To be fair though, it's a been a long time (six months perhaps) since I experienced total meltdown, so I had reason to be confident.
Wednesday rolls around and I stroll into Pat's cube like a man on a mission. "Step aside Butch" I say with a cavalier attitude, I've got shit to do, and a mere desktop monkey is only going to slow me down. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Holy fuck was this beyond comical. Here's the breakdown of how Wednesday went:
- SDS runs a network version of Ghost so that you can image your drive over the network. Pat tried to start that one real quick and it immediately failed.
- SDS also runs Ghost-on-crack software called ZENworks from Novell that is supposed to be the absolute shit. Nope, try again. We begin imaging my drive across the network using ZENworks when I discover that it's going to take longer than I expected. Rather than sit around twiddling my thumbs, I politely thank Pat for his help and then take my laptop back to my office across the street where I can use ZENworks on my own.
- Back across the street I fire up ZENworks and start the copy. Thirty minutes later if fails for no reason that it gives me.
- Thoroughly disappointed with ZENworks, I break out the heavy duty tools. IT Security (us) own a device that is used to make an absolute perfect copy of a drive. This tool is so good that we use it when the FBI swoops down and needs to look at someone's machine. We go take their computer (that's the royal We, other people actually handle it; I work on other stuff), pop out their hard drive, hook it up to this fancy doo-dad and press a button. Once again, this is a dedicated tool built solely to make perfect replicas of hard drives for things like evidence in court. After an hour of futzing with it (laptop hard drive to laptop hard drive throws many things for a loop) I finally kick off the process, only to have it run for 2 minutes and fail. Seriously, the dedicated tool that we use (and have succesfully used many times I might add) to produce court-worthy evidence has failed me. fuck
- So. wtf to do now? My wonderful co-worker Cory brings me his external hard drive and a copy of Ghost to try and copy the hard drive that way. For some reason though, the people at Symantec thought it would be great fun to allow the CD to boot with CD drivers, or USB 2.0 drivers, but not both. For those of you not on the technical T.I.P, that means that I can bring the computer up with either the CD-ROM drive holding the software I need to run, OR the external drive where I was going to make a copy of my drive to, but not both. Wonderful. What next?
- I get the bright idea to try and run Ghost from inside WindowsXP on the broken drive. It would have worked, and Symantec has gone through MUCH trouble to make the experience down to like 4 clicks to back up your drive like this. Unfortunately, that's for everyone but me. You see, I use Windows and Linux on my computer (or DID rather) and Ghost freaked out when it tried to copy and couldn't handle it. I won't explain the details at the moment, but (WARNING TECHNO-BABBLE AHEAD) I had too many partitions for Ghost to add another entry for itself to reboot and clone my drive.(TECHNO-BABBLE OVER). Hrm.. what next?
- On a whim I try to boot from the Ghost CD one more time, and lo and behold I find that the exernal drive DOES work if I load the CD-ROM. Unfortunately (I'm saying that a lot aren't I?) it's only runnning at USB1.1 speeds, so instead of the 30 minutes it should have taken, it's telling me that it needs a total of 7 hours to run the whole process. Yeah, I don't have time for that. HAHAHAHA! The irony.
- That ended my day on Wednesday. The fight was still raging, but I had plenty of vim and vigor ready to spit in the face of danger while I wrestled the technology to my will.
Thursday I showed up to work ready to kick some ass (metaphorically, I don't think people around here would appreciate it that much). So I moved on to the next in my list of things to try:
- I got the bright idea that this would all work if I could get the Ghost CD to boot with both CD and USB 2.0 drivers, so I spent all morning trying to put those two together. 4 hours and a stack full of coasters later, it wasn't happening.
- Ok, at this point I'm about ready to cry (metaphorically again, the only time I cry is... well never. :P), and I've been splitting my moring betwixt trying to get this running and running down a doctor's appointment for my near-death wife. I decide that I'm no good at work for the day, so I head home to better look after my lady-wife. I have better tools that this crappy University anyway for this cloning thing.
- So I head home. After fighting and fighting and fighting with it I finally get the hard drive cloned. It took a ton of effort and SO wasn't worth it, but I've finally got the old data to the new drive. Now comes the test. I install the new HDD in my laptop and boot up. ANNNNNDDDD!!!! failure. (TECHNO-BABBLE WARNING)Grub is fucked up(TECHNO-BABBLE OFF). Chris tried to help me rescue it, but alas it wasn't to be. So what next?
- Fuck computers. Fuck them in their stupid asses. I quit. It's format and reinstall time. That thing that I didn't do initially because it was going to take too long? (unmentioned before this in the blog though) yeah it's time to do that. I've wasted what, two full days trying to get things back without 'wasting' time?
- Format/reinstall. I win again, but at what cost?
Ok I'm tired. There is the battle, and finally, for all to see is the exact reason I'm good at computers. Shit like this happens all the time to me, and even though I win in the end, it usually takes me eons longer than it should have, and I accidentally learn everything there is to know about whatever it is in the process.
Cryptic though of the day (still not explaining): Maybe I could just burn it down?
And I'm spent.
