Its dead Jim

So last week my computer died. By my computer I mean the control board on my main hard drive. Kristina went to K-town to visit her parents and all but 1 of my friends where out of town. I took this rare opportunity to play Company of Heroes online with some friends until about midnight. I went to bed with dreams of gaming all day Saturday dancing in my head. I got up the next morning about 8 am and crawled into my office. My computer was not sleeping as I expected nor was it quietly and patiently waiting for me to start some delicious games. No my friends, instead it was sitting at the BIOS screen waiting for me to insert a bootable disk or drive.

This next bit is for you more techno savvy among us:
My immediate action is to hit the power button, pull the plug and go take a piss. As I contemplate making a pot of coffee I plug my computer back in and hit the power button. The computer POSTs, runs through the RAM check and then hangs on the IDE autodetect. After about 30 seconds of watching the little blinking cursor blink in the same spot I start to panic.
I am going to fast foward through a few hours of frantic phone calls, hard drive swapping, and much much much swearing and bring you up to about 1:00 in the afternoon.
At this point I have determined that some little tiny piece of silicon on the control board on the bottom of my hard drive decided 3 years and 2 months was a long enough life and it didn't need to do whatever it is that the little piece of silicon is supposed to do. The drive powers up just fine, I can feel the platters spin. There where no warning signs of mechanical damage like the click of death but I tried the freezer trick anyway. The drive is not recognized as being attached at all, I tried it on 3 motherboards. Some boards hang on trying to detect the drive and some just don't bother and skip over it no matter how adamantly or precisely I tell the BIOS exactly what kind of drive is attached. Conclusion: bad control board, perfectly good platters and heads. If I can't get a computer to see the drive how the hell am I supposed to use all my sweet recovery software? The drive is exactly 2 months out of warranty and it has also been discontinued so no one has an identical unit in stock. There go all my hopes of getting a free replacement or a good drive to cannabalize parts off of in an attempt to recover my data.


Regular readers pick up here:
This dead hard drive had all of my personal stuff on it, you know, pictures, this semesters' homework, emails,and inexplicably all my backups. I swear I had my backups going to another hard drive. I guess I was wrong, lazy, or careless. I finally resign myself to the fact that I have lost everything with no chance whatsoever of recovery. The next logical step is to begin to rebuild. I head out to Fry's Electronics to pick up a new drive. They don't have any of the drives I want in stock. I head over to CompUSA and Best Buy. They have the drives I am looking for but for exactly twice as much as my favorite online merchant. While I am desperate to get my computer back up and running quickly I am not "pay twice as much for the same thing" desperate.
I head home dejected and lonely. When I get home I go online to www.newegg.com and order 2 hard drives

Tech alert: I am running a Raid 1 array of 2 -250GB SATA Western Digital drives. 100% data redundancy FTW!!!!11!!1! I find it slightly humorous that Fry's had no Western Digital drives in stock except for some high priced Raptors.

I now sit and wait patiently for 3 days for my order to process and ship. As usual newegg is disturbingly fast and efficient with my order. It is processed by Sunday night and the drives ship Monday morning. UPS 3 day ground gets them here in... drum roll please.... 3 DAYS!
So Wednesday night I begin the system rebuild and that pretty much brings us up to today. The system is back up to my personal standards and I have begun to install all those unnecessary additions.. like games.

I know it was probably a pretty boring read but thanks for sticking with it. This was a pretty big deal in my book and I will be saying things like "I had a copy of that but it died in the crash of '06" for years to come. Just like I still say "I had that album/song until the drive crash of '02". Case in point: Don called me yesterday asking for an updated resume.
One of these days I will learn to stay diligent with my computer back-ups.