Lol, at last a non porn post and with no urls to hot teen chicks. More of a rant at my own stupidity and a heads up for those of you who never do backups.
I’ve had an ongoing problem with my laptop HD since late December or early January. No big deal as everything on my internal hard drive is backed up to an external HD.
Naturally I bought a new HD for the laptop and when I got it I backed up everything, again, to the external drive and then inserted the new drive. However when I tried to restart the PC wouldn’t find the new HD and Dell has such a wonderful system I couldn’t/can’t get into the actual bios to see if the damn drive is even there.
I also can’t find a way around Dell’s page for items in Bios. Pissed me off to no end. Still does. I don’t know what the problem is or even how to get to it to fix it. Sheesh. Don’t even actually know if the new drive spins or not. So it’s sitting on my bookcase waiting for me to think of something new to try or to run across a solution.
My old drive is limping along but running diagnostics still says failure is emminent. Keeping it defragged and clean is about all I can do. Oh, it was also running very slowly because I had a problem with Norton. LuComServer_3_4.EXE is a resource hog and was using 90% of system resources about 90% of the time.
While it’s not a virus but instead part of the Norton anti virus protection system it’s worse than a lot of viruses I’ve had for messing up a PC. Finally got that figured out and just killed it permanently. Then I couldn’t update my virus definitions or anything else. Sheesh.
So I uninstalled it and then installed it again from a new version. Seems to be working correctly now. So once again I backed up everything to the external drive. Pretty smart huh? Lol, not really, as you will see.
I’m using a Western Digital Caviar in a Simple Tech enclosure and I bought it about three years ago toward November of 2005. It’s been problem free ever since I bought it. Heh, so had my laptop and I bought it a few months earlier than the drive.
Sunday morning I was working away and got up to go to the kitchen for some food. I noticed the power strip was sticking out a bit so I pushed it back under the chair where it lives. When I came back I tried to save a file in Homesite and it wouldn’t let me. Looked and the drive wasn’t in the list so I got up and looked at it. The power light was off.
Big deal I thought, must have bumped the switch when I pushed the power strip back so I tried off and of a couple of times and got nothing. Tried turning the power strip off and on and no joy there, either. So I disconnected the drive and the power cable.
While looking at it I found a wire break right where it goes into the converter that plugs into the power strip. Took that apart and couldn’t see anything work except the broken wire. Promptly drove 40 miles to Best Buy to see if they had one.
Nope, dumb asses didn’t even know what it was. Geek Squad my ass. Sheesh, I may be an idiot but sometimes I need to find an idiot even smarter than me. 
When it comes to PC’s lots of people are supposedly smarter than me but when it comes down to it there are few that are and that’s really scary.
If I had all of their tools I could solve my problems in a few minutes to an hour at most. Anyway, I went back home, carefully removed the insulation from the wires and rewired it back up so everything was connected and correct. I happily plugged it back in knowing I had solved the problem.
Guess what? Didn’t work. Argh. Probably fried the ac/dc power converter or the board inside the HD enclosure. Once again, if I had the right tools I could tell in a few minutes if the drive was still good or if it was a power problem.
So off to the net I went to look for a solution. Then I had a really bad thought. I needed a new HD that was bigger than the one that wasn’t working. So I went to Tiger Direct and found a new drive for 69.99 and a new enclosure for another 29.99.
I need the new drive either way because the non working external drive was my backup. Unfortunately I have about 85 gig of my site stuff, articles, site design templates, a million pics and a ton of videos and movies plus all of my applications for making sites. All antiques of course and most not even remotely replaceable.
I had a great plan for backups for my C drive. Forgot about having a plan for my backup drive. If the new enclosure doesn’t solve the problem I’m pretty well screwed. Stupidity at it’s finest. I just hate it when it’s my stupidity that bites me. Dumb ass.