Mars & Mercury, and that grinding noise
I got a little worried, I as I was expecting to see smoke coming out from a vent on the trusty laptop. See, I’m off to Dallas for a bit of family business. And the laptop? It was/is making one of those horrible noises.
Grinding. Sounds like an old 5.25 inch drive with platters the size of a regular CD. Grinding, grating, and I can almost see the little read/write heads bouncing on the platters, data being screwed, blued, and tattooed all to hell and back.
First thought? When was the last backup? Tuesday night, complete backup made while I was sleeping. But what about the stuff I’ve added since then? Some scopes, a link or two, the journal entries, and that one idea I had? Plus that design I was working up for another project? Can’t lose any of that material!
Wait, this thing is still under warranty, that special extended kind. Breath in, breath out, slow down.
Test software, diagnostics, where’s the CD for that?
Imagine that heart-stopping sound of a hard drive spinning to stop with everything on it. Imagine the pop-art version of “The Scream.”
I got lesson in manic-person & calm-customer-service when I called up Apple to inquire if the hard drive was, indeed, covered. Sure it was. I’d run the hardware test, ten minutes’ worth, and it showed no trouble.
Ran Norton, loath as I am to support that company because of all the spam I get from them. Yeah, I know, it isn’t really from Norton, but still. Anyway, the problem wasn’t the hardware. I was just a little scattered, though, the “routine diagnostic procedure” took me two hours. Two hours when I couldn’t do anything useful with the machine.
The hard drive was very scattered, as in fragmented. Severe. A couple of the B-Tree headers were pointing to blank spaces. Like I would know where certain B-Tree headers were supposed to point?
Got me to thinking, though, sure it did. When was the last time I did any routine maintenance on the laptop?
Last time Mercury was retrograde. Scrambled my thinking, that’s for sure. Just one of the natural cycles.