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Ramona gets expensive
Tuesday, June 12 2012
On my main computer (Woodchuck), I depend on the operating system residing on a solid-state drive, which speeds up such things as boot-ups and application launches. Since moving to Windows 7 a week ago, though, I'd been once again working exclusively from a mechanical hard drive. And by the time I'd installed what I needed to in the Windows 7 partition, it had outgrown the size of my 120 gigabyte SSD. So today I took delivery of a 250 gigabyte replacement, which had cost a little more than $200. I thought moving the Windows 7 partition onto this drive would be easy, but I was wrong. I kept trying different techniques, but none of them worked. I tried using Clonezilla on a Linux-based live CD, and though it copied over the entire partition, that partition kept refusing to boot. And since the copying took over two hours to do, you can imagine my frustration to realize it had given me nothing. Eventually I started using another computer to do the copying using a backup created by DriveImage XML, restoring that image over a freshly-installed copy of Windows 7. At first that seemed to work, but when I went to try it on Woodchuck, it turned out that my user profile was completely broken. Evidently the restore had failed in some important details, perhaps because of the relatively complex granularity of file system permissions in a Windows 7 installation.
Before I went off to bed tonight, I assigned Woodchuck its third or fourth partition copy job, and when I woke up early the morning of June 13th, I checked to see if this copy had worked. It hadn't, but then when I poked around I realized that AOMEI Partition Assistant had a wizard to "Migrate OS to SSD or HDD." Using that, I was finally able to pull the migration off.
Today during the many periods when I was waiting on partition copies to complete, I did a number of other things (such as watching episode eight of the first season of Girls on my laptop). And this afternoon Gretchen and I took Ramona to the Hurley vet to get a definitive diagnosis of the problems with her right leg. Our visiting vet hadn't been sure one way or the other, and we thought maybe an xray was in order. But it didn't take long for the Hurley vet to conclude that Ramona's problem was probably an expensive one: a torn cruciate ligament. He had us feel for all the fibrous build up around her right knee indicating the compromise of that joint. And he could make the joint move in ways that were impossible with an intact cruciate ligament. We'd gone down this road in the past, of course. Eleanor had required surgical repair of both her cruciate ligaments, costing us over $3000. And though there was only a problem with one of Ramona's knees, the second one typically fails within a year of the first if the first one fails. Still, the fact that Ramona is having this problem at such a young age suggests to me that she experienced some sort of accident. We're not happy to be spending thousands of dollars so soon on Ramona, but we've already bonded with her and any alternative is unthinkable at this point. Worse even than the money of the surgery is the bother of keeping her penned up for the eight weeks necessary for the surgery to heal. According to the vet, though, we have some flexibility when it comes to performing the surgery. He says we can wait a few months if we want to.
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