Fenris, you idiot! A cautionary flame (warning: excruciatingly long and detailed)

The BBQ Pit
1

Rule one of tech-support: Back up your data regularly and especially back it up before messing with anything, and sneer smugly (silently) the trevails of those idiots who don’t.

Rule two of tech-support: God help you if you’re a tech and break rule number 1.

So it’s last Friday (a week ago, not last night), and I think: “Jeepers! My li’l 20-gig HDD is gettin’ pretty full. There’s a sale on HDDs and I can get a 40 gig! Kewl! I know what I’m doin’ Friday night!”

So I get a 40 gig HDD.

For those not in the know: Putting an extra HDD in is generally pretty easy. You set the jumpers (switches) on the back of the HDD to the correct settings, and do the same for the old one, plug it it, do some software stuff like formatting and partitioning and poof! It’s done.

But not if you’re an idiot.

I had a stuck a leftover 5 gig HDD in my system a while back originally for the purpose of doing the whole Linux thing. When I got bored, I just used it as extra space. I copied all of the info off the 5 gig HDD onto the 20 gig. Normally, I’d tell anyone to “Back up your system…just in case.” but since this was such an easy operation, and since I was just adding a drive, I figured “What could go wrong?”

:rolleyes: Fatal last words.

I shut down the system and opened the case. I set the jumpers on the new 40 gig HDD to “Slave”, pulled the 5 gig drive out and tried to fit the 40 gig HDD in. It wouldn’t fit in the bay. There were three slots, the 20 gig was in the middle one. “No problem” thinks I, “I’ll just pull it out, slide it into the top slot and there’ll be plenty of room!”

I begin to slide the drive out, when my fingers slip and scrape along the bottom of the drive. The unprotected circuit board at the bottom of the drive. I feel something fall into my hand. I look. It’s a small piece of plastic. With two little metal prongs.

Doom.

Everything was on that drive: databases, mp3s (mine, representing hundreds of hours of ripping them from old vinyl albums), encrypted password lists, e-mail addresses, web pages, short stories, * everything.* And my backup set had been phyiscally damaged and I hadn’t gotten around to doing a new one.

The way I’ve always determined that it was time to back-up my data was the ::shrug:: vs “FUCK!” factor. In other words: If I lost everything since my last backup, would I ::shrug:: or scream “OH FUCK!”. This went through the “OH FUCK!” stage and out the other side.

Whatever that plastic piece was, it was necessary for the drive to boot. After several minutes of cursing, I decided to see if I could run the drive if I held the plastic in place. It worked! So I shut down the system and hook up the 40 gig drive as a slave. I’ll quickly rip everything off the original drive and then just toss it.

Oops. Not so fast: BIOS issues.

*For those not in the know: BIOS stands for Basic Input Output Sustem. It’s the most basic level of instructions for your computer. It’s how your computer knows to look at your floppy drive and then your hard drive to boot up. It’s the stuff that happens when you first turn on your computer. If you look carefully as those words scroll by, you’ll be able to see what kind of BIOS you have. *

My BIOS, it turns out, won’t recognize a HDD greater than 32 gigs. I bang my head on the desk. Imagine going to a high-society party and seeing the reaction of Margaret Dumont to a hooker that Groucho’d brought: that’s how my BIOS was reacting to my new HDD. Frosty cold silence.

Reading the (fucking) manual, I learn that the lovely folks at Western Digital have anticipated this, and have provided a disk that contains a BIOS patch that’ll let the system work with HDDs larger than 32 gigs. I run it, it recognizes the 40 gig HDD, formats and partitions it and I’m up and running!

After what seems like hours, I’ve got everything copied from my original HDD to the new one (Remember, I’m doing this one-handed, since I’m still holding that plastic bit on. I was afraid of gluing it…what if I’d gotten glue on one of the contacts or something?)

I remove the 20 gig HDD, reset the jumpers, plug the 40 gig in and try to boot. Nothin’. The HDD is ignored completely. After several hours of screwing around, I figure out that the Western Digital BIOS work-around didn’t get transferred to the new drive. Or something. Anyway I need to reinstall the patch. No prob. Except that the patch insists on re-partitioning and formatting my new HDD (I’m not sure why and neither are the folks at Western Digital, who were very nice).

To make an excruicatingly long story less long, the upshot was: I had to get a 30 gig HDD, use it as the master drive, run the BIOS patch on it (and let it format/partition), reinstall the 40 gig HDD as a slave, copy, copy everything to my C drive, do a whole bunch of dos renaming of directories (you can’t copy over a Windows directory while running Windows: you’re using the programs you’re trying to overwrite)

Anyway, I got everything back through a combination of dumb luck and hard work. And for those of you who’ve noticed that I haven’t been posting much for the last week or so, now you know why.

I keep wanting to end this with some sort of horrid pun, but I can’t think of one.

But the moral of the story is: There’s no such thing as a “little” hardware job and back up early and back up often.

Fenris

2

A a current Tech Support type person, I couldn’t agree more.

So did you get your data off the 20G drive?

3

Yeah. I managed to save everything. But it wasn’t fun and had as much to do with dumb luck (what if I’d broken something that had a dozen connectors, as opposed to just two? What if holding it in place hadn’t worked?) as it did with any skill or knowledge on my part.

Fenris

4

Glad to hear that everything worked out in the end. Are you sure that Scylla had nothing to do with this?

5

Least your computer didn’t actually, say, explode. :slight_smile:

6

I thought I was the only one that pulled stunts like that! God Bless You!

For your edification I have:

1: Recovered a BIOS “blind” off a floppy because I had previously flashed the wrong MB definition and it killed the MB video capability. So I had to re-install and re-flash guessing where the system was (it worked).

2: Pried the only working BIOS flash chip for another MB off the bottom of my shoe when I stepped on it in a parking lot after it fell out of my pocket. Straightening the prongs was like a prayer. Please God don’t break! OK. Please God don’t break! OK. Please God don’t break! OK. and so on.

3: Blown a MB by dropping a screw into a working unit.

4: Blown a MB by pulling a network card out it’s slot thinking the unit was powered down but it was only sleeping.

5: Destroyed an external parallel port ZIP drive (back when they cost $ 160 each) by pulling out a stuck disk with needlenose pliers then realizing afterwards that there’s a paperclip sized eject hole in the back. “I don’t need no stinking manual”.

6: Had to re-format my kids’s PC when I tried to add an external Iomega CDRW and got a low level OS message of death. Thought I somehow blasted the OS so I re-formatted and decided to upgrade to ME since I was re-installing anyway. ME wouldn’t let the system do a soft shutdown. Sigh… re-format and re-install 98SE and games etc. After spending entire weekend with this project and getting PC back up I decided to get latest Iomega drivers. Right there on the front of the support web page is a 30 second procedure to fix the OS message of death which turned to be caused by the $%#@!@* Iomega drivers after all.

…and that’s just a taste. The upside is that you gain enough experience wading through this nonsense over the years that you can generally fix anything short of an electrical meltdown or explosion and few PC failures panic you. Having said this the next sounds from my system will naturally be "ZZZTTTTTT!!!"

7

Small corollary for all you developers out there.

Never run a “build all” or “build clean” script written by someone else until you’ve looked at what it does.

I had un-backed-up code for about a dozen really cool side projects under the same parent directory as my work folder. Never thought it would be dangerous to run an ant build script in one of the subdirectories. Didn’t realize that the author of the script (for some unknown reason) had it set to delete the parent directory! :eek:

So… I sad there horrified as it printed out “Deleting c:\projects”, and by the time I cancelled it, it had wiped out several months worth of AI work and 3-4 other small projects in an unrecoverable way. I ended up going home sick that day and spent several days grieving after I discovered that it’s damned near impossible to find anything capable of undeleting files on a FAT32 Win2K machine.

Now I’m just running a CVS repository in a safe place on my laptop and sync-ing it up with the home server once in a while so I’ll never lose anything.

8

The very first computer I bought new (as opposed to getting it used or as a hand-me-down) was an Amiga 500. (I loved the Amiga…sigh). Anyway: I had to mail-order it, as the only people in Denver wanted about $800.00 for it. It arrives and I’m desperatly setting it up. I’d been waiting for something like 5 weeks and had been suffering. I slap everything together and plugged in the old dot-matrix printer. I don’t remember if the Amiga had the male and female-ness of it’s parallel ports backwards from the PC-type computers or what, but < blushes > I plugged my printer into the serial port. (And, if I remember, the Amiga had umm…which ones…pin 14 and 15? The one that carries power) reversed from standard.

I turned the printer on first, then turned the computer on.
There was a sad little [sub]bzzzt[/sub], which quickly escallated to a [sub]bzzz[/sub]zzzzZZZ[sup]ZZZ[/sup]pop[sub]sizzzzle[/sub] sound. Then everything went dead. It took another three weeks to get a replacement.

And while I’ve never stepped on a bios chip, I’ve done the same thing as you with pins (“Please don’t break”).I share your pain.

Fenris

9

Oh my.

After reading all of these posts, I think I’ll stop surfing the boards and burn a new backup CD. I haven’t done one in a few weeks.

Man oh man. What a nightmare you have endured!

10

Since I got my new computer, I have done three re-formats and re-installations without making a backup CD.

I know. I’m tempting fate.

11

I want you to know, I’ve turned on my PC to surf. The Mac is burning a backup CD as I type.

I have seen the light!