Tag: thomas

Thomas’ hard drive on his computer (my old Beige G3) went south quite awhile ago. I thought I had successfully copied everything from it last weekend onto another drive, but I couldn’t get his computer to boot with that drive. I thought there might be something wrong with that drive so this weekend I did some more drive swapping in order to get Thomas another drive. Here’s where things stood before I started:

1. One 80 Gb drive in my computer is my startup drive
2. One 80 Gb drive in my computer is a data-only (non-booting) drive
3. One 30 Gb drive that was “laying around” that I had tried to make Thomas’ new drive but wouldn’t boot
4. One 160 Gb new, unformatted drive

It’s really easy to swap drives in and out of my computer and it can hold up to four hard drives at a time. Because of that, I have been doing all the work there. One of the drive mounts is vertical and is held securely by a single screw. Almost every time I remove that screw, it falls between the hard drive and the mounting sled. Usually, I just turn the mounting sled upside down and the screw falls out. This time I forgot to do that and it evidently shorted out the hard drive circuit board next time I powered up. It took me a while to figure out what had happened since the only symptom was that my computer wouldn’t boot. When I realized what had happened, I switched focus back to installing Thomas’ new hard drive so that I could feel somewhat successful on the day. Alas, the same problem occurs there as the previous hard drive – the computer won’t recognize the drive as a boot drive. Failure there. After all my efforts, here’s what I had left:

1. One 80 Gb unbootable and probably unreadable hard drive
2. One 80 Gb drive with Thomas’ stuff on it that won’t boot in his computer
3. One 30 Gb drive with Thomas’ stuff on it that won’t boot in his computer
4. One 160 Gb drive presumably with my carbonite offer codes on it
5. Two computers that won’t boot

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with the 30Gb drive so I’ll continue to work on getting that to work for Thomas. I’ve got a week-old backup that I can restore to the second 80Gb drive, but I really don’t have a drive I can boot with now. Perhaps I’ll boot with Thomas’ 30Gb in my computer until I can restore the 80.

Sometimes I really, really hate technology.