All: Pardon my unnannounced absence today. If you sent me email (mailto:si_admin@techstocks.com) last week and I hadn't responded to it yet, please send it again. My unanswered mail for last week is gone.
I see I've got 94 messages in my Inbox. <groan> I'll get those caught up tonight.
For those interested in such things, my hard drive crashed yesterday, taking with it the aforementioned email, my SPANK.PL program (for spanking spammers), and my browser. Well, everything.
I'm currently working on getting everything installed from scratch on what was my secondary drive (a nice IBM 34.7 gig drive) and getting back up to speed. It's an arduous process.
Here's the part that makes it somewhat interesting: My machine never has the cover on it. Never. I'm always in the middle of upgrading something or have an upgrade pending. I didn't have either of my hard drives bolted down since I'd just added the IBM drive, and when I turned in my chair, I bumped the case and apparently knocked the drive onto a corner of the power supply. After some snapping, smoking, and pungence, my computer summarily crashed. Burned a hole right through one of the chips on the hard drive's controller board.
Here's what makes it ironic: I recently replaced a drive in a friend's machine after theirs crashed and I couldn't get it back to life even temporarily enough to get their data. I gave their new drive a volume name of "BACKUPSRULE", chided them for not making backups, and smugly pointed to my Onstream 30-gig tape drive.
Turns out the last backup I've done was on 8/26/99.
There is a God and He's got one heckuva sense of humor.
I think I can revive the drive, though, by replacing the controller card (or whatever you call the card physically bolted to the drive housing). Finding one or even the same drive is a challenge, though. It's a Quantum 8.4-gig Fireball. If anyone knows where I can get a whole drive or the card, please let me know via PM. I want my data back, real bad. The silk-screened number on the card is 20-11438. According to Quantum only a similarly-numbered card will work but they won't sell me one. |
