The volume in drive H:\ is Dirty...

When it rains, it pours.

I had no sooner lamented about how hard it was to keep up with everything, when my computer's UPS ("uninterruptible" power supply - sic) quit out on me.

Not only did it die, but it died hard. It did so without any warning and completely cut the power to the PC and all the external devices.

I couldn't get it back up so had to scrounge a power strip from some long forgotten dusty corner under a desk in the kids room. When the system came back up I was horrified to find my external USB drive failed. It was making sick grinding noises - never a good sign for electronic equipment.

This to me is bad. Really, really bad. I keep all of my flatlands stuff on there.

Now like a good boy I do keep backups. I have some old CD burns I made a few months ago, but more importantly I have a backup that is more recent on another drive (thank you ThinkSync!), but it still meant several halfway decent days worth of work were gone... flushed out into the ethereal toilet. :(

Talk about feeling like you were kicked while being down. I'm working hard to get ahead and all that work just gets wiped out. uggg. I momentarily contemplated giving up and taking a leave of absence from the computer for a while.

Then I got my senses and second wind back. I Rolled up my sleeves and dived in.

Even after removing every screw I could find, I still had to tear the damn plastic casing apart to get at the drive. Hooked it directly into the PC in true Frankenstein fashion. Crossed my fingers, toes and every other flexible appendage and rebooted the machine.

Uh oh! Blue screen-of-death. This could be bad.

"The volume in drive H:\ is Dirty"

That's a first for me. Never saw that message in 20 some years of tinkering with computers. It looked ominous. I tried to decide if there was pr0n stored on that drive and if so how dirty it was, but before I could come to a conclusion Windows began crunching numbers and doing... well... something. I'm still not sure what it did, but it ground through the drive 1 painful percentage point at a time. 10 minutes later there were no other messages and I could explore the drive.

Needless to say I spent a great deal of time (until 2 AM) getting the most critical bits and pieces forklifted off that drive and tucked in other places. It was a setback, but thank goodness not a horrible one.

Today I have a new UPS (from a DIFFERENT manufacturer) and thanks to eBay a new external case is on it's way so I can try and rebuild my lovely H:\ drive and put here back up on top of the PC where she belongs and not dangling around inside held willy-nilly by cables and power wires. If things go well I may invest in another external shell and put one of these old harddrives I have laying around to good use as well ;)

In the mean time I have got to get my steam back and figure out what karmic deed I need to do to get the scales back in my favor so I can get some work done!