Its been quite sometime since I wrote here. Yes, you guessed is right. Work. As I had mentioned in one of my previous post, we have a milestone around this week. Most of the work from my end has been done well in advance. Except for a few minor hitches, everything is going on smoothly. But the last couple of days have been kind of hectic. And, the next couple of days would be hectic too.
This weekend was pretty lazy and relaxing. My car-hunt is on. Finding it very difficult to find a decent car. On saturday, we had been to Johnson City (around 15 miles from Kingsport) to see a car. Before going, I had checked with the seller on the condition of the car, the vechicle history etc… The car was supposed to have a little hail damage., and the seller told me that he was the first owner of the car and the car had a clean history.
We did manage to see the car, but could not meet the seller. He wasn’t there!! He had told us that he would be around!! But we did manage to get the VIN number. Came back, did a carfax check on the VIN number only to find that the odometer of the car had been rolled back! No wonder the car had low miles on it! besides, the car has already had 3 owners! So, the hunt continues….
Sunday, saw Taxi No 9211. Timepass movie. Nothing special. Two characters all bent upon screwing each other. No storyline……….nothing. I am just wondering about the fact that there is a page at wikipedia for this movie. LOL!!!
Also saw the award winning movie ‘Crash‘ (Official Site). Was good. Some scences were very touching. Would rate around 8.5 on a scale of 10. Oh. Yes, I subscribed to blockbuster.com online.
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April 24th, 2006 at 04:37pm
While I was working on the laptop on Saturday night, all of a sudden, the laptop stopped responding. A minute later, I got to see the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).
For me it was pretty much routine to see the BSOD, and I thought to myself..”yet another Microsoft/driver problem”… but I was wrong. I rebooted the laptop, and found that the system wasn’t booting up. Further investigation showed that the hard-disk wasn’t detected in the BIOS itself :(. Aaahhhhrrrrrr………
What a bad time for the HDD to crash. I didn’t have a boot disk or any alternative media with which I could boot. :( So, the entire Sunday, was without a computer. Somehow spent the day seeing some (stupid) TV channels ….etc.
Monday.. i.e., today took the laptop to the office, and they said that its totally dead, and all the data is gone. .. they could try sending it to some external agencies to recover the data, but its gonna cost quite a bit. Luckily, there wasn’t any major data loss.
So, spent most of the day today setting up the software and environment that I would need for my day to day work…and its not fully over yet.
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February 28th, 2006 at 09:27am
The ants needed some hard disk space, and so, my hard disk was attacked by red ants last Friday.
Result : Hard disk conked off.
For the past couple of days, I could see some ants on my table. But never thought that they would get into the machine and take shelter inside the hard disk.
Everything was working fine till Friday morning. When i switched on my machine Friday night, the boot sequence was kind of abnormal. Scan-disk came up, and reported that some parts of my HDD weren’t readable, and was kind of stuck. Then I rebooted my machine, skipped scandisk, and managed to boot into windows. But it took around 30 mins to boot into windows. Damn slow. Knew something was wrong with the HDD. Rebooted again, and went into BIOS setup to detect HDD. In BIOS, things were behaving in a very unpredictable fashion. BIOS would detect the HDD sometimes and sometimes, on boot, i would get the message ‘Primary master failed’ etc. So, I decided to open up the PC and see whats up inside. Only to find that there were lot of ants right inside the HDD. :(
I have 2 HDD. Seagate (40 GB) and Maxtor(160GB). Both are stacked one about the other inside the cabinet. The ants were between these two HDD. Both the HDD’s were effected. But my primary HDD - Seagate was kind of damaged - may be bcoz of a short circuit. I immediately cleared off most of the ants that were outside. But there were ants inside too. i.e., between the PCB on the HDD and the sealed section of the HDD.
Took the hard disk /machine to the local vendor on Saturday, opened up the PCB of the HDD, cleared it. But the damage was already done to Primary HDD. :(.
Impact : Immediate and major impact was, lost the windows installation and some data. But nothing major that i can remember. So, i had to start from scrape on the other HDD. I am done installing all the basic stuff needed for day to day use.
Recovery : Luckily, the failed HDD (Seagate), was recognized by the BIOS. But there weren’t any partitions. I guess the partition table was damaged. Now, the recovery is on. I have managed to recover 3 out of the 4 partitions, and attempts are on to recover the last partition too. Some data is gone. But thats nothing to be worried about.
Reason : Not very sure what the reason is, but this is what my wild guess is. Its rainy season now, and is pretty cold outside. I keep my PC on for the whole night most of the days, and as a result, the HDD area is kind of Hottest spot in our room/house! So, i guess the ants sensed the warmth, and decided to take shelter over here.
Need to do a full fledged pest-control of my room/home. Now, no antivirus software can prevent this :). Can they ?
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July 24th, 2005 at 01:43pm