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| Crash! |
| Wednesday, March 14, 2007 |
The highlight of the weekend that went by, apart from a friend's birthday party and DH cooking, is, my laptop went Crash!ing. I was so involved in other happenings around the house that I didnt know my laptop was suffering three full hours after the incident. I saw a bunch of messages with Stop signs, Cannot do this, cannot save that, blah,blah and so on when I did give attention to my laptop. I decided to do what all users of Microsoft OS are advised to do when encountered with problems. Restart.
After entering my hard drive password, words of doom appeared on the screen, "Disk read error" At that moment I knew my hard drive had crashed. I retried restarting a couple of more times, hoping against hope that by some miracle my laptop would be healed. But alas! that was not the case to be.
The rest of the evening I took over DH's laptop to do internet surfing, although I could not check work email from a non-work laptop. Luckily I had gotten some quality work done the day before, which is very uncharacteristic of me, to do work before the last minute, so I was not all stressed out.
This is the first time such a thing is happening to me, although I know that hard drive crashes are badddddd. When I was back in school my roommate had a hardrive crash, and her three years of PhD work disappeared into a black hole never to be found again ever. I remember her being very upset. After that episode she always took regular back ups of her work on CDs.
Thankfully we have regular daily automatic back ups of the hard drive. It used to be such an irritating job, used to run for about 15 mins, slowing down your system entirely. Of course now I am thankful for them. Not that I had much on my disk anyway, just some documents and some pictures. The most I would miss were my email archives. So much important info is transferred through emails, I have archives of all my email since I started work, and refer to many quite often.
Monday I went later than usual to work, knowing the Tech guys would open only at 8AM. Turns out they openned at 9, $%#$^%^#. I called them up openned a ticket and sat there at the service window until the clock struck 9. I showed the guy my laptop and my condition and he said most probably I will have to get a new hard drive. He said he will call me in one hour. I came back to my cube, told my boss my situation and went to a visitor cube where I could check my work email. There wasnt much else I could do without a laptop, I felt stupid sitting in my cube without a laptop. So I decided to head home. DH was at home. I waited and waited for the phone call, it didnt come.
At 1PM I went back to work, called up the Tech, a little heatedly told them my situation, and they guy said the laptop is ready to pick up.
I went up to the walkup window and the guy said he had to get me a new hard drive. My old one had just decided to die. He partially did some set ups, including wireless access set up and remote connect set up. He told me how I could retrive my files from the back up, and dismissed me quickly.
As I walked back to my cube, I thought I should give a feedback about how rude he was, and how late he was.
The whole day went in me trying to work as much as possible with the painful retrieval process happening on the system.
I was so tired with all this no-brainer-but-need-to-do-work that I felt like eating yummy tangy bhelpuri. I picked up DH at home and directly headed to the Chaat place. Only half way down the heavy traffic we realized the place was too far away, about 12 miles, and it was going to take 30 mins to and fro in the traffic. Was it worth it? It so was! :--) Me and DH never get to do things on a weekday evening. When every single restaurant is not crowded. We had yummy bhelpuri, dhahi vada, samosa and chole bhature. Yes dieting went right out the window, I was ravenous. Somehow this impulsive trip brought back college memories. When we used to go out and have loads of icecreams. Sit at the parlour and talk and talk and talk about everything under the sun.
I came back home and realized that my remote connect was not properly configured. %%^$^$%^$%. I was so angry with the guy at Tech who did a rather shabby job restoring my hard drive.
But anyway since most of my work is in Unix, on a machine safely tucked away only-God-knows-where, my work was not hindered much. I have lost my mail archives, which I am still trying to figure how to retrieve. Hopefully I will be back on track soon.
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posted by SK @ 7:06 AM  |
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