Hard drive scare

So I'm sitting here. I need to scan some photos for a website I'm designing but the computer connected to the scanner is occupied copying 45.4GB at 17.8MB/second from one external drive to another. I don't want to disturb the magic that makes all of this possible.

Earlier tonight The Kid called me on my cell phone. He was in his art studio/bedroom and I was watching a Bones episode on DVD. Not sure when this family stopped being able to get up and walk from one end of the house to the other. The Wife does the same thing. She'll call me from the bedroom when I'm in the office. She'd only have to raise her voice slightly to talk to me but the phone is more reliable.

The Kid said something like "I can't connect to the Maxtor" and I knew immediately this was a big deal. He has years of film footage stored on that drive. And no backup.

"Can't help you now," I told The Kid. "Maybe in a half-hour."

It's been one of those days. One of my employers had a pair of "You MUST do this NOW" jobs and another spent a half-hour trying to sell me a distributorship for a vitamin drink while his wife looked for the FTP username and password for his web server. And all this time I had a deadline looming for still another employer.

When the Bones episode finished, all nicely wrapped up with no loose ends to flap about, I walked into Richard's bedroom and found four of his skate buddies looking very worried.

The Kid told me that he had been working with the drive and then it disconnected.

I looked at the drive. The power light was dim but not off. I tried cycling the power button and disconnected everything. It was while I had the power adapter disconnected that I noticed the power supply block light was on when disconnected but turned off when the power supply was plugged into the external drive.

This is all too much detail. I'm even boring myself. I apologize. I'll speed to the end. I have an even more ancient external drive -- this from the days when 76GB was enormous -- that I figured I could put The Kid's hard drive in for a quick test.

Sure enough, when I removed The Kid's hard drive from its external case and plugged it into my other external drive enclosure it worked fine. I decided to give the drive a test by copying folder called backupraw, and here I am with a couple of minutes left before I can get back to work.

While I wait, I'll toss in a few holdover flower shots.

Here you go:





Got to get back to work now.

Day 54 of 365