2011 — 20 May: Friday
I'm still working my way steadily through the latest batch of slides I scanned recently. Here's a shot of Christa in Old Windsor in the late 1970s — still looking happy:
I suppose it's just barely possible that I may already have mentioned that red was her favourite colour? But then, it's equally possible1 that I may yet develop enough commonsense to go to bed at a reasonable hour, too. Instead, I've just finished watching the first four episodes of season #5 of "House" — I felt obliged to stick with it until Wilson's return. Yawn. G'night.
Isn't it fun...
... when you power on your lovingly-crafted six-core 64-bit Blackbeast PC and, erm, nothing2 happens? What a good job I hadn't managed to get the venerable Gateway PC up into the loft.
Having nipped out to the shops to grab some fresh ingredients (and give my subconscious a chance to nibble at the problem) I'm currently suspecting either the motherboard or the graphics card as the symptom was a dead screen (that I've proved is fine when hooked up to the earlier PC). I think further investigations will have to wait until after some breakfast as it's now 10:08 and I am starving.
Grrr! Still, at least it's a sunny day (so far).
The weather is...
... turning appropriately gloomy now (it's 12:10) as I'm forced to the conclusion that either the motherboard or its BIOS is currently kaput. I don't get so much as a flicker of a hint of a power-on startup screen. Still, it's not as if I have any shortage of other stuff to busy myself with. This is a bit of a pain in the arras :-)
And (of course) my next-of-kin (aka Tech Support) son is still in the Bahamas, bless him. <Sigh> It seems there is a conspiracy on the part of the Universe to force me to finish sorting out "Christa stuff" and put up the damned shelving. Double Grrr!!
My afternoon...
... entertainment has been to discover that, although I can remove one of my simple mirrored3 1.0TB (data) hard drives from Blackbeast and pop it into my external SATA cradle, and although XP on the Gateway PC is then happy to acknowledge the presence of this drive in its disk management table, I'm afraid it's designated "alien" and would remain so until and unless I convert it back to "basic" format. Call me paranoid if you will, but I've a nasty sneaking suspicion that doing this would safely ensure I never see the data on it again.
I am now thinking my best option may be to strip Blackbeast back to its original "bare bones" state as purchased, waltz it back to Novatech, and suggest they prove to me that the motherboard is healthy. Thank goodness I have the Mark Kermode film chatter to keep me light-hearted. Definitely time for my next cuppa.
Evidence, if...
... needed, that I managed to install the XP drivers and applications for the Canon scanner that, until now, has only been connected to Blackbeast:
"Black Swan", by the way, is a Blu-ray. I've been on the lookout for it for quite some time.
Life on the edge
My researches4 have convinced me that — in the next phase of my PC life — I shall stoutly eschew any further use of "dynamic disks". Having attached a spare 1TB external USB drive to the Gateway, I've put one of Blackbeast's two "dynamic" drives back into my handy SATA cradle and am about to try to persuade it back from the Dark Side with the help of "TestDisk" and the advice and guidance on offer here.
If it works, I should have the last several months of Blackbeastly data available to me on the Gateway and will then be able to deal with whatever the underlying problem is on Blackbeast in a more leisurely fashion. After all, I'm retired. Mind you, I'm also getting too old for this sh1t. You should count the number of tea-bags I've got through today!
[Lengthy pause... three episodes of "House", in fact. Not to mention a meal. It took a long time to analyse the drive, and then decided there was something odd about its geometry in any case. There's just no pleasing some software, is there?]
Well, that didn't work. Now, let me think, who do I know who might be willing (temporarily) to accommodate a pair (a matched pair) of 1TB SATA drives in a spare machine for long enough to suck all the data off them for me, onto my spare 1TB USB drive? Then I can safely blast them back into 'basic' disks and resume work on Christa's study :-)