Biting the Wax Tadpole
Mar. 18th, 2008 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howeirdThat's what it felt like, even though I wasn't drinking a made-in-China Coke® at the time. My Western Digital SATA drives keep crapping out when I reset the system or have to do a power button power-down (Windoze locks up, hold down the power key for 6+ seconds to shut down). There are two Seagate barracudas and two Western Digital caviars plugged into the same Intel RAID, as two mirrored pairs. The Seagates are running fine, but the WDs keep getting worse and worse. Sunday night chkdsk clobbered what was left of the boot volume, so last night I popped in another Seagate, connected it to the primary SATA connector (It's a Marvell, on the same Intel motherboard) and installed a fresh copy of XP Pro and then SP2. Before I left the apartment I started restoring from my external backup.
If that works, I should have everything back to normal tonight. If not I'm looking at a long and tedious re-installing process. Photos, email and docs are on the non-boot RAID volume, so I don't think I will have lost anything significant.
One thing which pissed me off is I used XP's built-in backup feature, and told it to build an ASR (emergency) recovery floppy, but when I tried to use it, XP said there were no recovery bits on the diskette. This required me to install Windows and Sp2 on the new drive just to get to the backup function. The floppy should have saved me that hassle, and about 3 hours.
Two unexpected eye candy moments Sunday. I was helping my friend Janice find a knee brace in Long's drug store, and they have changed the layout so we split up to look for the right aisle. Every aisle I poked my head into, at the other end of the aisle there was this very pretty tall blonde woman, 30-ish, in a stretch halter top. I'm pretty sure she was following me, because my search was very random and covered half the store. If Janice had not been in a rush (she had a plane to catch) I'd have introduced myself.
That evening, I was on a halvah run at the Arab market in Mountain View, and wandering the aisles in search of sweets was a gorgeous woman, 25-ish, in a dress which looked like a cheerleader's outfit, except without the pleats. She had amazing legs, and was showing most of them. The top of the dress was sleeveless, but the neck was modestly cut. While I was in line at the register, she was behind me, jumping up and down, saying she was cold. I suppose I should have offered my jacket, but I was almost on my way out, and felt very awkward, her being dressed like that in a place where it's not uncommon for women to be wearing kafiya. The staff there seem very modern, but one never knows.
If that works, I should have everything back to normal tonight. If not I'm looking at a long and tedious re-installing process. Photos, email and docs are on the non-boot RAID volume, so I don't think I will have lost anything significant.
One thing which pissed me off is I used XP's built-in backup feature, and told it to build an ASR (emergency) recovery floppy, but when I tried to use it, XP said there were no recovery bits on the diskette. This required me to install Windows and Sp2 on the new drive just to get to the backup function. The floppy should have saved me that hassle, and about 3 hours.
Two unexpected eye candy moments Sunday. I was helping my friend Janice find a knee brace in Long's drug store, and they have changed the layout so we split up to look for the right aisle. Every aisle I poked my head into, at the other end of the aisle there was this very pretty tall blonde woman, 30-ish, in a stretch halter top. I'm pretty sure she was following me, because my search was very random and covered half the store. If Janice had not been in a rush (she had a plane to catch) I'd have introduced myself.
That evening, I was on a halvah run at the Arab market in Mountain View, and wandering the aisles in search of sweets was a gorgeous woman, 25-ish, in a dress which looked like a cheerleader's outfit, except without the pleats. She had amazing legs, and was showing most of them. The top of the dress was sleeveless, but the neck was modestly cut. While I was in line at the register, she was behind me, jumping up and down, saying she was cold. I suppose I should have offered my jacket, but I was almost on my way out, and felt very awkward, her being dressed like that in a place where it's not uncommon for women to be wearing kafiya. The staff there seem very modern, but one never knows.
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