Tuesday, January 30, 2007

When it rains

Emboldened by my recent CPU upgrade, I bought a SuperDrive, which is Apple-speak for a drive that reads and writes DVDs and CD-ROMs.

I installed it yesterday, along with a hard drive that's been sitting at the bottom of my Mac forever. I forget why. It was screwed in, but at a location where no ribbon cable could reach it. The G4 case has, I discovered, a slot for a hard drive beneath the optical drive, so I figured I might as well install it and find out what it is.

It was a 40 GB drive, empty.

All went well. Everything worked. I decided to use this new drive for back-up of crucial files, so I booted Carbon Copy Cloner and set a script to run. I also started a back-up, but cancelled that.

The first DVD I fed my new SuperDrive appeared on my desktop just fine. When I tried a second DVD, my machine just sorta hung.

I'm in no mood to give a blow by blow account, but somehow my directory got hosed. My original start-up hard drive, the one I was going to back up, can no longer start up my Mac. It hangs at the Gray apple logo as the gear spins and spins and spins.

I was able to start up the box by putting a system on another of my hard drives (I have three in there). TechTool Deluxe was able to make my sick drive readable.

As I write this (on Elvi's computer), my computer is again trying to boot on my original drive. Again, it's stalled at the gray Apple logo. I suspect I will be able to rescue files, but it's going to take a while. Serves me right for trying to back up my data.

Why am I writing this on Elvi's computer? The power cord on my laptop started emitting wisps of smoke as the power cord gave up the ghost, again. This time, it was the end going into the power adapter. I'm stuck without any of my files or applications. Thank goodness for Gmail. Thank goodness that I have nothing on deadline at the moment.

I'm going to try to use this little vacation to not slit my throat.

Bonus night out:

I attended the Montreal Film Group's first birthday party last night. I spent most of the night talking with my cousin (who let me touch her laptop and it didn't explode), Juliana (a former student I ran into), and journalist/researcher/documentarian/ass-kicker Sandy Wolofsky, an old friend who I keep running into at screenwriting courses, movie showings, and other events. We get along great every time.

1 Comments:

Blogger Elvi said...

did you keep the first power cord that died? Maybe you can splice the two together...

January 30, 2007 3:43 PM  

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