|
|
|
all the fail it's thrown my way
Monday, June 4 2012
Sarah the Korean and Gretchen carpooled down to Manhattan today, leaving me here by myself for the next several days.
This morning after walking the dogs, I watched the season finale of Game of Thrones, now in its second season. It was one of the weaker episodes, falling into the trap that it had been mostly avoiding up until now: going over the top with cheeseball supernatural shit. Up until now, I'd found the "White Walkers" a compellingly-ominous mystery. But in tonight's final scene, we're shown a whole army of them, all decked out in their finest unhealable zombie injuries. They're a lot less mysterious that way; indeed, they seem a bit comical, which devalues the whole experience.
At some point in the late morning, I found myself trying to get rid of a vexing problem with Woodchuck under its new Windows 7 regime. Every time it would boot, it would hang for a very long time (one to three minutes) with the message "Initializing USB Controllers." This was intolerable, because it meant coming out of hibernate would take a long time, and hibernate is the only power-saving mode that works on Woodchuck (sleep has worked in the past, but it hasn't since I upgraded to a quad core Intel processor). But at some point in the course of many reboots, Woodchuck claimed that the new 3 Terabyte hard drive had failed its SMART test. And from then on Windows refused to boot. I could do nothing to fix the problem; Windows 7 couldn't seem to recognize the hard drive even enough to install a new OS onto it. Had the hard drive experienced a premature failure? (That has only happened to me once, back in the early 1990s with a several-hundred-megabyte Macintosh SCSI drive.) Luckily I could fall back on my old Windows XP installation, which gave me some hope of getting some work done today.
I took the 3 TB hard drive out and installed it into another computer with the hope of running some diagnostics on it. Surprisingly, that computer started to boot up into Windows 7. The boot eventually failed (Microsoft operating systems do not like being moved from one computer to another), but it seemed to indicate that the drive was actually fine. Perhaps the problem was a cable, the motherboard, or a connector.
So I plugged the hard drive back into Woodchuck using a different SATA connector and cable, and the damned thing started working again. It's hard to accept this setup as a reliable system given all the fail it's thrown my way, but I might be sticking with Windows 7 after all.
It was a cold, rainy day, and by this evening I wanted nothing more than a hot bath. Unfortunately, there's been so little sunlight of late that I had to resort to electricity to get the water suitably hot.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120604 feedback
previous | next |
