Last night I downloaded the new version of iTunes. It installed, then merrily started running through some conversion process - something to do with zero gap playback or something. My PC went kinda wacky half way through and ended up freezing and not shutting down properly. Then it wouldn’t boot. The Windows XP scrolly bar thing would do it’s thing, then the machine would reboot. A bit of probing turned up the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error message. Uh, yeah - cheers for that then, sounds like my hard drive is fucked (technical term!)
Right now, having spent a few hours pissing around with it tonight, I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that my drive is fucked and I’ve lost pretty much everything on it. My initial thoughts of a corruption on my Windows XP installation, leaving my data partition all intact and unspoiled are long gone. Sure, I can boot in to my “play” partition and it mostly works (but I still can’t see my data drive). Yes, I can boot in to my Linux partition (and have it report a bunch of errors that point to hardware failure if I try to mount the data partition).
And the real kicker is… I’ve got my “storage server” sitting here.. and I bought a bunch of 300Gb hard drives to rebuild it with.. and I did.. copying the stuff on the old server over to my PC first.. only I never copied that stuff back for the most part. I copied a couple of PC and laptop backup images over, but I didn’t copy my music, my pictures, my old backup files, work bits and pieces. It’s pretty much all lost. And I keep remembering other stuff that’s also lost.. like my podcasts (luckily I have back ups) and the supporting bits of audio (of which I don’t). I could spin it with “Oh well, it ties in well with my ’simplify your life’ kick of cleaning and tidying that I’ve been doing lately” (threw out loads of magazines and shit) but who am I kidding? I’m pissed! I hate that I’ve lost shit and can’t get it back. I hate that I’m the techie guy who ought to know better yet didn’t practice what he preached.
Fucksake I HATE Maxtor. Their drives suck ass. From the four 40 gig drives I had in my storage server originally, one failed within the warranty period and I got it exchanged. Another one failed a couple of months outside the warranty period. And now this brand spanking new 160 gig SATA drive that was in my “new” PC has gone tits up. ARRGHHHHH it does my fucking HEAD in!
At the end of the day, sure, lesson learnt - backup important stuff, do it often, and preferrably to multiple places if you don’t have a nice storage server with a redundant array of disks.. but there’s really no use bolting the stable door after the horse has done a runner is there? In short, I’m kinda fucked for a while while I pick up the pieces, get a new hard drive, reinstall everything.. I can probably get the Maxtor warrantied, but honestly - do I want to? No.. I’d much rather have a hundred bucks and go out and buy some other brand..
*sighs* oh well.. onwards and upwards, right?
In other news - work was shit today, people are stupid, and to top it all off it’s pissing with rain and I think I need milk. FUCK! Just one of those days eh?!
