It appears my hard drive is crapping out, and Circuit City needs me to run some sort of system restore utility before their warranty kicks in. Only problem is, the system restore utility CD wasn’t included with the computer. So now I have to order it from HP. But the HP “store” isn’t open until Monday. After that, it will take 5 days to arrive.
At which point it will prove completely ineffectual, and we’ll be back to square one.
Because I have no other computer, I don’t know that I’ll be able to post if this one craps out in the meantime.
So, there you have it.
Call me. You can tell me what you want and I can post it.
Your posts might not end up verbatim, though.
Sheesh! And a hangover as well. I don’t feel so bad about my plight now.
I’ve got an old rope-start model you can borrow if yours goes on strike. I’ll e you my contact info.
Thanks. I’m hoping this one can keep limping along until that CD arrives.
Maybe you need a backup laptop. You wouldn’t want us to go a day without you, would you?????
Do youself a big favor. Quickly, go online and find to cheapest xxxGB USB backup drive offered at your local BestBuy, CircuitCity, Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot, CompUSA, et. all. Buy it immediately and backup your existing drive. It isn’t fun when the drive decides to finally go and you’ve lost all those pre-DRM lawsuit MP3s and family digital pix. And, oh yeah, the stuff you put here, too, I suppose.
Good luck.
Have a USB backup hard drive. Now I have to figure out what exactly I need to back up besides my desktop and my docs.
Jeff, I’ve got a desktop box with a Linux install on it that you can borrow if you wish. I can bring it over on short notice for you.
Email above.
You can come blog at my house if you want…If my laptops didn’t all have my client files on them, I’d just lend you one….Come to think of it, my Apple powerbook doesn’t have client files on it, let me know if you want to borrow it.
Nine people most likely to put pins in Jeff’s voodoo doll thereby disabling his computer (and causing a really shitty hangover):
1. Deadbeat Neighbor
2. Dan Rather
3. Kos
4. Jeff “it ain’t no party cock” Gannon
5. Martha Stewart
6. ALMIGHTY GOD
7. Dov Bear
8. Ward Churchill
9. Oliver Willis
Tack me on to that list. And maybe put Oliver twice.
PW lists are always 9 long. Knock off Dov Bear. You can take him.
Technically, your hard drive is not an inanimate object, but it couldn’t hurt you to have a nice heart to heart chat with it. You know, respectful and appreciative. . . just to let it know you care.
Then, once you’ve received your new drive, ask to keep the old one in memory of its faithfulness.
Place it in proudly in your office in a prominent spot. Then, vigorously introduce it to your ball-peen hammer.
The best way to dispose of a hard drive is to arrange to drop it from chest height while it’s accessing data.
It won’t feel a thing. Might shatter your motherboard, but it’s never liked you anyway, even after you gave it pie.
Been there before… Lesson I learned was NOT TO BUY HP equipment…
The disk will actualy get there in like 2 days. They ‘Forgot’ to give me one too.
I’ll second that. Fuck HP.
How would you go about doing that? Exactly? Inquiring minds and all.
Ana, You look for an external USB port and go from there.
The husband (the geek) sez that HP *should* have this available for download on their website. If you can’t find it (they like to hide shit like this) when you chat with them tomorrow, ask them to direct you to it. You might have to be persistent about it. You shouldn’t have to wait for a CD to arrive.
Good luck! I hate HP—I use a compaq laptop and of course the keyboard and the battery on it crapped out right after the merger, so I feel your pain.
If worst comes to worst then we’ll call the 4 – 5 days that you’re w/o a computer a sabatical. Yeah, yeah that’s it a sabatical. We’ll be lost without your daily wisdom injection, but think about how rejuvenated and refreshed you will be, and how your will creative juices flow afterwards!
Plus I’m guessing Martha could use the break also. Her pussy’s got to be sore. She’s sixty years old, for Pete’s sake.
And we’ll just take over the comment threads, to make sure the inspired lunacy level doesn’t drop by more than 99%.
I’m reluctant to post this since it rates very high on the geeky scale and is totally lacking in any sarcastic redeeming value.
There is another option that I use when to back up my son’s laptop. This only makes sense if you have a laptop with not a lot of GB storage and a desktop with more than enough extra capacity.
You’ll need a crossover ethernet cable (I got mine at BestBuy) and a copy of Symantec’s Ghost backup program on each computer. Essentially, you configure a Ghost backup session where it copies the entire disk contents onto the desktop computer which can then be transfered back after a disk failure, even if the new disk is of a different size.
In my case, it took about 20 minutes to backup 4GBs of notebook disk usage. I do this backup about every three months and it has already proven its worth after having to restore the system. No need to analyze which files to backup, just save the whole thing.
gl
tramadol