Sunday, February 20, 2005
Was helping the kids play a game on Erika's computer when I heard that tell-tale "tick tick tick" sound which means that things were not healthy with one of its hard drives. Sure enough, I get the message "Secondary master drive failure, press F1". Thankfully it is not the boot drive that has gone on the machine, so it can still function, but the telltale sign of blank icons lists the programs that have gone to great bit bucket in the sky.
Still assessing what was lost, but the main thing was the digital photos from the past 5 or so years stored on it. The reason I can say "I feel fine" about it is that the same data is backed up on two other of the networked systems in the house, so I doubt anything at all has been lost.
Turns out that the system was also riddled with spyware, which was in part carelessness on Erika's part and some more recent programs installed on it that came with their own malware. Will lock that system down tight from this point on.
So off to buy a new hard drive for that machine tomorrow. I see that $100 and change will get me about a 160+ GB hard drive these days, which is several multiples of the size of the drive that died. When installed, I will be inching close to a terabyte's (1,000 GB) worth of storage throughout the household network. Bizarrely impressive due to shear size of storage available, and that I might actually use that much available space (and I don’t doubt I will, over time).
The final irony is that the remaining hard drive on that is a 20GB Fujitsu, possibly the most notorious name for hard drives in terms of failure rates (at least to me, I've had one fail at work and one at home within a year after purchase).
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